Hi all, I'm the lead of the Seeks project (http://www.seeks-project.info), an open source design and software for enabling social websearch. The core idea is to work on top of existing search engines and to regroup users whose queries are similar so they can share both the query results and their experience on these results. The system does more than this, but this is not the point here.
The regrouping of users on the basis of their queries uses a DHT and a custom LSH (locality sensitive hashing) scheme. I am in the final stages of implementing the routing layer of the DHT. It is based on the Chord protocol, protobuffers, and UDP packets. Seeks development requires advanced skills in many areas of computer science. Being mostly an AI guy, at this point I'm seeking advice from p2p experts and practitioners, and more precisely on the following two points: - Every of the DHT machines supports a variable number of virtual nodes. Therefore our DHT key generation scheme uses: 48bit of the MAC address and 112 random bits (not from a 'strong' generator), that are then hashed with RIPEMD-160 to get the 160bit key. With no huge expectations on the number of nodes in the near future, does this seem a robust scheme to you ? My understanding is that uniformity should be around that of the RIPEMD-160 itself. - Given the objectives of the project, are there some problems and not so well-known caveats I should be aware of when using a Chord-like protocol ? I'm aware of the general litterature on Chord (optimal routing, rotating virtual nodes, deBruijn graphs, ...). Should I look into something in particular ? Any other comment, criticism and other advices or speculations are welcome, as we expect the DHT to reach the main trunk in a (finite) number of weeks now :) For those interested in the project at large, here is more information: - technical overview: http://seeks-project.info/wiki/index.php/Technical - a manifesto: http://www.seeks-project.info/manifesto.html - a list of public (standalone, metasearch) nodes you can use already: http://seeks-project.info/wiki/index.php/List_of_Web_Seeks_nodes - documents: http://seeks-project.info/wiki/index.php/Documents Source code is available from our git repository on Sourceforge, the DHT remains under heavy development with several daily commits, but is nevertheless accessible from the 'dht' branch. Thanks, Emmanuel Benazera _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
