Coral is an open source, peer-to-peer content distribution network designed to mirror web content. Coral is designed to use the bandwidth of volunteers to reduce the load on websites and other providers of web content. To use coral, simply add .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname in a URL. So, for, example, http://en.wikipedia.org/pac/Main_page becomes http://en.wikipedia.org.nyud.net:8090/pac/Main_page. The latter is known as a coralized link.

One of Coral's key goals is to avoid ever creating hot spots that might dissuade volunteers from running the software for fear of load spikes. It achieves this through a novel indexing abstraction called a distributed sloppy hash table (DSHT), and it creates self-organizing clusters of nodes that fetch information from each other to avoid communicating with more distant or heavily-loaded servers.

The project has been in an open beta testing phase since March 2004. During beta testing the Coral node network will be hosted on PlanetLab (http://www.planet-lab.org/), a large scale distributed research network of 400 servers, instead of third party volunteer systems. Of those 400 servers about 120 are currently running Coral. The source code is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

External links

Coral, project of the NYU Secure Computer Systems group (http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/)