We'd like to publicly announce the availability of CoralCDN, an open peer-to-peer content distribution network, beta-deployed on PlanetLab since March 2004:

http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/

To take advantage of CoralCDN, a content publisher, user, or some third party posting to a high-traffic portal, simply appends .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname in a URL. For example:

http://news.google.com/ --> http://news.google.com.nyud.net:8090/

Through DNS redirection, oblivious clients with unmodified web browsers are transparently redirected to nearby Coral web caches. These caches cooperate to transfer data from nearby peers whenever possible, minimizing the load on the origin web server and possibly reducing client latency. In fact, such servers should see near to a single request per web object to initialize the cooperative cache.

I think this will be big: a free, distributed hashtable-based global caching proxy network for any web content. It could cure the Slashdot effect; it could end the bandwidth worries of small operators with popular rich-media content. And it's got pretty maps of the deployed system.