Because peer-to-peer (P2P) networks easily connect many remote computers, they can pool resources efficiently, as any Gnutella or Napster user can attest. That's led some researchers to propose that millions of P2P machines can leverage their distributed processing power to act like one giant supercomputer.
Attempts to get the idea to work, however, have run into problems, such as the excessive time that queries require to "flood" across millions of computers. But at the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing in June, a team from AT&T, Cisco Systems, and several universities claimed to have solved the problem.
Because the flooding-based query algorithms don't scale well and tend to overwhelm large systems, the researchers have figured out a query algorithm based on multiple random walks. A managed set of queries "walks" among remote machines. A slide show is available at www.tc.cornell.edu/ics02/.