


In such social contexts, peer-to-peer as a meme refers to the egalitarian social networking that has emerged throughout society, enabled by Internet technologies in general. The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. While P2P systems had previously been used in many application domains, the architecture was popularized by the file sharing system Napster, originally released in 1999. Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client–server model in which the consumption and supply of resources is divided. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. Peer-to-peer ( P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. A network based on the client–server model, where individual clients request services and resources from centralized servers
