Pastry

http://freepastry.org/images/freepastry-logotype.png

Introduction

Pastry is a structured peer-to-peer overlay network. It provides a self-organizing network of nodes upon which more complex peer-to-peer applications, such as group messaging or data storage, can be built. More information, including research papers and software downloads, can be found at the homepage of FreePastry. FreePastry is an open-source Java implementation of Pastry developed at Rice University and maintained by the same group of researchers now at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

FeedTree is built atop Pastry and Scribe.

History

Assembled from various authoritative accounts, the history of Pastry (as it relates to FeedTree) is roughly as follows:

• 2000-01: Peter Druschel (at Rice, but on sabbatical at Microsoft Research Cambridge) and Antony Rowstron (MSR) invent a DHT, called PAST, and then discover that the routing algorithm is quite general and interesting in its own right. They call the routing system Pastry and write the first Pastry paper (PDF). They hack out a version (apparently in Java).
• 2001 (fall): A group of students at Rice (in Druschel's COMP 413), implement Pastry from scratch (again in Java) and call it FreePastry. They add lots of features, and then add some more.
• 2002-04: FreePastry continues to evolve; it's perhaps the most stable and featureful of the research overlay networks (vs. Tapestry, Chord). Apps on top of it at this point: PAST, Scribe, SplitStream, Squirrel, Scrivener, Glacier, and ePOST (a full p2p email system, still under active development at www.epostmail.org).
• 2002-04: Somewhere in here Pastry was also ported to C# a couple of times; VisPastry is a simulation-only implementation, and MSPastry is a deployable .NET library.
• 2004 (fall): Dan begins work on FeedTree.
• 2005: the FeedTreePaper is published; the Pastry development team moves to MPI with Prof. Druschel, where they continue to expand and enhance the software.