chimera_overview

Chimera: A Library for Structured Peer-to-peer Application Development

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Overview

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Chimera is a C library that implements a structured, peer-to-peer system. This work is an attempt to provide a library that allows easy development of applications on top of a peer-to-peer routing infrastructure. The goals are twofold. First, we wanted to make a fast, lightweight, C implantation of a Tapestry-like system includes some of the optimizations provided by other systems. Second, we wanted to develop a system designed to export an API in line with existing work that describes how to effectively interface with such an overlay network.
The library implements a routing infrastructure much like those provided by Tapestry and Pastry. The system contains both a leaf set of neighbor nodes, which provides fault tolerance and a probabilistic invariant of constant routing progress. It also provides a PRR style routing table to improve routing time to a logarithmic factor of network size. Using this library, developers can build an application that creates an overlay network with a limited number of library calls. They can implement their own application by providing a series of up-calls that are called by the library in response to certain overlay network events.
The library we developed will serve as both a usable interface and a starting point for further research. This library implements a relatively complete version of a structured peer-to-peer system we described. It includes some of the current work in locality optimization and soft-state operations. It also provides an interface that can be used as is to develop applications, but that will allow for the infrastructure to be changed with little impact on existing application code.
Rama Alebouyeh
Last updated 02/16/06