Coral (network)
Coral is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network for the distribution of content. Coral is designed to use the bandwidth of volunteers to reduce the load on websites and other content. To use Coral, simply add .nyud.net to the domain of a URL . For http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseiteexample, it turns out http://de.wikipedia.org.nyud.net/wiki/Hauptseite.
One of the goals of the Coral system is to avoid hot spots in the network. This could prevent volunteers who fear peak loads from using the software and thus contributing to the network. To achieve this, Coral uses a new technology called distributed sloppy hash table (DSHT) and creates a self-organizing network of nodes that draw content from each other in order to avoid connections to distant or loaded servers.
The project has been in an open beta phase since March 2004. During this phase, the Coral network is operated on PlanetLab , a large distributed research network with around 400 servers, instead of outsiders and volunteers. Of the 400 servers in PlanetLab, around 260 are currently part of the Coral network. The source code of Coral is freely available under the GNU GPL .