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New system developed to transfer movies and music quicker

12/04/07 - A new file-sharing system is being trialled in America which allows movies and music to be transferred over the internet quicker. The Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET) system uses data from a number of other files to speed up the transfer of the file being downloaded.
Currently download speeds on popular services, such as BitTorrent, are restricted by the number of users that are sharing the file that is being downloaded.

However the SET system developed by the David Andersen of Carnegie Mellon University, Himabindu Pucha, of Purdue University and Michael Kaminsky of Intel Research can work 500% faster than regular downloads.

Because a shared file is divided into chunks of data the SET system simply identifies which files contain the same chunks of information that file that is being downloaded requires.

This technique is called hand printing and has been used to identify junk emails in the past.

Because many of the files shared on the internet do contain identical data such as artist information and track listing the SET system can increase download speeds.

However, even the researchers were surprised by just how similar shared files on the internet were.

Professor Andersen explained his shock when he told the BBC website: "In retrospect, of course, the causes of the similarity (different audio tracks, different artist names, etc.) make a lot of sense, but I honestly didn't expect it at all,"

When tested, the SET system increased the transfer time for a MP3 music file by 71% and it made the transfer of a 55Mb movie trailer 30% faster.

Prof Andersen expects the SET system to have the most pointed impact when used to download less commonly shared files.

"It gives clients a larger pool of other clients to draw from. This probably won't matter much for super-popular data, where there is already a huge set of people downloading it, but our experiments suggest that in the other cases, SET can help a lot," he explained.

The professor hoped that the SET technique would be copied and adopted into the mainstream.

"This is a technique that I would like people to steal," he added.

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<a href="http://www.pulsewebhosting.com/news/new-system-developed-to-transfer-movies-and-music-quicker/73/" title="New system developed to transfer movies and music quicker">New system developed to transfer movies and music quicker</a> Published Date: 2007-04-12 15:39:03

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