NAPSTER LESSON.

• Author: FONTANA, JOHN
• Position: P2P, or peer-to-peer, computer networking

Music-swapping may lead to a new networking paradigm -- peer-to-peer

IT IS A RECURRING THEME IN the creation of popular software: College whiz kid has vision and writes program, program finds favor in high-tech circles, then bums like wildfire across the consumer and/or corporate markets.

Shawn Fanning is one of the whiz kids. In the fall of 1999, the college dropout developed software that allowed people to link their PCs over the Internet and share files. The software was Napster, the files were audio, and the payload was popular music. Before long, 32 million people around the world were plugged in and sharing.

Napster may succumb to legal attacks from the Recording Industry Association of America. But the technology behind Napster may foment a revolution in corporate computing strategy, backed by big-time players including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.

The technology is peer-to-peer networking. P2P allows PCs to bypass a centralized computer -- a server -- and talk directly to one another, sharing files and other resources.

Advocates say P2P provides an alternative to erecting and maintaining banks of expensive servers. They see individual PCs acting as servers to each other, fostering widespread collaboration, much like groupware programs such as Lotus Notes. P2P would also be able to harness the collective power of networked PCs, effectively turning them into powerful supercomputers. Advocates also see the technology reducing bandwidth usage across wide-area data networks and leading to inexpensive data storage networks with natural-language search capabilities.

Critics contend P2P further complicates already complex corporate networks and erodes centralized control, which provides management and security benefits. Some say the technology is redundant to existing systems, especially for applications such as file sharing, and lacks the standards to integrate disparate systems. "Napster got everyone's attention," said Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly and Associates in Sebastopol, Calif., a high-tech publishing and conference company that is hosting a three-day P2P event this month. "The question now is what can we do (legally) with all these computers and devices connected into one network."

BERTH OF A NEW MODEL

P2P is in contrast to the client/server computing model, where high-powered server computers dish data and applications to client PCs. The Web is an example of a client/server model, with Web site servers feeding data to Web browser clients. E-mail uses client software to retrieve messages from an e-mail server. P2P is an alternative to the server, intended to take advantage of the millions of PCs connected, at high speed, to today's global Internet and to high-speed corporate networks. Napster, for example, needs its network of peers making files available to each other. If it employed a client/server model, Napster would require an incredible number of servers to store vast quantities of audio files and to track users.

While Fanning created Napster, the idea of distributed computing -- as some call P2P -- is not new. Its origins can be traced to 1969 when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the precursor to the Internet, linked computers on four college campuses for sharing files.

Today's P2P resurgence comes thanks to the number of PCs...