The Client Utility as a Peer-to-Peer System

Abstract. The Client Utility system developed at HP Labs in the mid 1990s was designed to address the problems inherent in distributed computing. This paper shows that the architecture we developed solves some of the problems faced by designers of Peer-to-Peer systems, particularly those of discovery, trust, and naming. We show how elements of the Client Utility architecture can be used to address the problems found in some existing Peer-to-Peer systems.