zButterfly 2.0

zButterfly is a BitTorrent client with a powerful search engine.
In 2001, a new technical standard was developed - called bittorrent - that enabled transfer of very large files using a new peer-to-peer model. In this approach, each computer in the network - referred to as a "peer" or "seed" - has the ability to send or receive pieces of files to others. A user wanting to download a file (a "peer") can literally obtain small pieces of it from multiple computers ("seeds"). In fact, a computer that has only a portion of a file is able to send that portion to others who may need it, even though it does not yet have the whole file. Thus, a computer in the system can both receive pieces of the file from multiple other seeds, and send portions simultaneously. Because users simultaneously obtain pieces of the file from multiple sources, they can get the entire file much more quickly.

Put another way, rather than relying on the bandwidth capacity of a single set of central servers (one-to-many), or the bandwidth capacity of one other user (one-to-one), users are benefitting from the distributed computing capacity of all the seeds in the system (many-to-many) - collectively known as "the swarm".