The history of all of these ideas would be a bit too lengthy to go into in detail, but here's a general summary:

"Sparky" was the little codename for a LimeWire alpha release (released about 2 months ago or so) that was a test of the "Query Routing Proposal," or QRP.

The QRP is simply a way of doing a sort of distributed indexing of files on the network -- basically a way of efficiently letting the computers you're connected to know what files you have so that the computers around you only forward messages to you that they know are relevant to you (searches for files that you actually have). Just think of it as a way of routing messages on the network to the computers that the messages are relevant to as opposed to broadcasting those messages to everyone. The idea is to improve the efficiency of message passing on the network so that it doesn't take up so much bandwidth, leaving you with more bandwidth for transferring files. More information is available at:

http://www.limewire.com/developer/qu...%20routing.htm

Supernodes, or "superpeers," as discussed earlier in this thread are computers on the network that for purposes here index the "client" computers that are connected to them (see earlier diagrams). They actually use query routing for communication between clients and peers, but don't worry too much about that. Basically, the supernodes sheild client nodes from all of the messaging on the rest of the network, only forwarding searches to client nodes if they actually have the files. More information is at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_gd...upernodes.html

Swarming is simply the ability to download a single file from multiple sources. So, you download different parts of the file from different computers simultaneously. The idea here is to allow you to download files as quickly as possible (as you can try to max out your download bandwidth if the uploader is the bottleneck). Note that this doesn't help for low-bandwidth users.

So, QRP is a proposal and not a person. Chris and Anurag are superstar LimeWire developers and pillars of the community!

Links to all technical papers are at:

http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/tech_papers