Random data exchanges

What am I looking at?

On the right you see an animation of MaRVIN peers exchanging data (you may need to zoom in). The horizontal axis shows 100 different peers, the vertical axis shows 100 different keys. Each white dot at (x,y) means that peer X holds one piece of data with key Y. The brighter the dot, the more data this peer has.

What is the data exchange strategy?

In this animation, peers exchange data randomly: they randomly pick some other peer, and give him some random part of their own data.

What are the advantages of this strategy?

Random exchanges maintain optimal load-balance: all peers have approximately the same amount of data. This means that no peer is overloaded and no peer is underutilised.

What are the disadvantages of this strategy?

Random exchanges are not very efficient for our task. We want to reason with triples, which means that triples with a shared key should meet at one peer to derive a consequence. With random exchanges, the chances of triples meeting is quite low.