A $1.1 million grant, recently awarded to Penn State by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, will enable the University to partner with the Internet2 consortium in the development of a technology called LionShare, an innovative tool that will facilitate legitimate file-sharing among institutions around the world through the use of authenticated Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks.
Though P2P technologies are typically associated with the well-known controversial file-swapping networks recently highlighted in mainstream media, the LionShare project has been designed to promote responsible file-sharing by providing a way for faculty, staff and students to exchange academic, personal and work-related materials on an officially sanctioned P2P network.
"It's vital for higher education today to make a concerted effort to develop technologies that encourage responsible file sharing," said J. Gary Augustson, vice provost for information technology. "We believe that LionShare will lead the way in this effort by providing a model for the positive ways P2P technology can be used for legitimate educational purposes."
According to Michael J. Halm, principal architect of the project, a prototype of LionShare already has been constructed and is functioning in test form at Penn State as part of a previous University Libraries/Mellon initiative known as the Visual Image User Study (VIUS). New funding from Mellon will be used to extend LionShare's capabilities on a global scale, creating a collaborative network that will enable i ndividuals from a diverse range of institutions to connect to the same secure P2P system.
The unique structure of Peer-to-Peer, which allows a high level of bandwidth and computing power to be shared equally among a community of network users or "peers," will make it possible for participants to extract specific resources from fellow peer computers, while simultaneously ensuring that these interactions are secure. LionShare also will provide a means for users to access well-known, large-scale repositories that contain digital video, images and other data throughout the U.S., Europe and other locations.
Halm also points out that a critical element of the project will be the participation of university teams in the Internet2 consortium in the creation of Open Source, or freely shared and distributed, software releases of LionShare. These groups will work closely with Penn State researchers on implementing the project's conceptual design, creating the software development plan, ensuring security and testing the completed system at their respective institutions.
"One of the best features of P2P is that it optimizes bandwidth consumption by distributing it throughout the community of network users — an aspect that will make it possible for an oceanographer, for example, to use this system to request and acquire a complex animated representation of sea floor spreading within minutes from the LionShare network. Hence, researchers and academics will be able to exchange extremely large files via LionShare that just would not otherwise have been transferable. We believe the knowledge Internet2 member institutions have acquired in this area will be essential in fine-tuning the system for academic interests of this nature," he said.
Two additional partners under the plan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Open Knowledge Initiative and a Canadian group known as eduSource, will collaborate with Penn State to create bridging technologies between LionShare and the centralized international digital repositories such as Merlot, SMETE, CAREO and EdNA, so that data from these centers can be interpreted and shared universally on the system's P2P networks.
In addition, Augustson said that project developers are designing LionShare's services to be flexible, enabling the network to accommodate both small private groups or large public organizations depending on specific needs. He also emphasized that the system will track user identity to ensure security, so that participants will never appear as "anonymous" to fellow network members when they're on the system.
"We envision that it will soon be possible for a physicist at Penn State to collaborate with a group of colleagues from different institutions around a specific set of scholarly resources using LionShare, and do this in an entirely secure and seamless way," he said. LionShare will demonstrate that P2P truly provides an exciting new tool for scholarly collaboration and synergy."