Standing for peer-to-peer, this is a distributed application architecture that is designed to partition tasks and workloads between peers.

In this model peers are equally privileged and form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

The way it works is by peers making a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.

Find out how to join a P2P network on the next page.

Basically the “peers” are computer systems which are connected via the Internet and files can be shared directly between systems on the network.

This means that each computer on the P2P network has become a file server in addition to a client because there is no requirement for a central server.

To join a P2P network there is only the requirement of having an Internet connection and P2P software. Some popular P2P software choice have been Limewire, Kazaa, Morpheus, and Acquisition.