AP2PC 2003

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is attracting enormous media attention, spurred by the popularity of file sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and Morpheus. The peers are autonomous, or as some call them, first-class citizens. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm for their potential to harness the computing power of the hosts composing the network and make their under-utilized resources available to others. This possibility has generated a lot of interest in many industrial organizations recently, and has resulted in the creation of a P2P working group for undertaking standardization activities in this area (http://www.peer-to-peerwg.org/). In P2P systems, peer and web services in the role of resources become shared and combined to enable new capabilities greater than the sum of the parts. This means that services can be developed and treated as pools of methods that can be composed dynamically. The decentralized nature of P2P