"Microsoft researchers in Cambridge have developed their own version of BitTorrent which the software giant will use to distribute big files such as films, television programs and software applications over the Internet," reports IDG News Service. [Note: this is badly phrased: it is not a version of BitTorrent.]
"Codenamed Avalanche, the technology is similar to existing peer-to-peer file swapping systems, including the most famous - BitTorrent - that divide large files into many smaller pieces that are shared by all users and reassembled on your hard drive to create a copy of the original."
The clever bit:
The problem with existing systems, according to Microsoft, is that people sometimes have to wait a long time to receive the last, "rare" pieces of a file. This is made worse when clients drop off line unexpectedly and creates bottlenecks when only a few clients have files that are in high demand.
Avalanche helps solving this problem, according to Peter Key, joint head of the systems and networking group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, by encoding the file pieces at the server with a special algorithm before they are distributed. Each encoded piece contains information about every other piece of the original file, so users don't have to collect every last piece in order to reassemble the whole, Key said.
Well, not that clever. There's the wonderful Par2, for example, which already does the same thing....
