Coding In Paradise

Coral: The New York University Distribution Network: "Coral is built on a novel distributed lookup abstraction we call a distributed sloppy hash table, or DSHT. DSHTs simply map keys to values, but do so in a way that avoids hot spots when large numbers of (key, value) pairs have the same key. Even if every node of a DSHT repeatedly stores the same key, the rate of store requests at the most heavily-loaded node is only logarithmic in the total number of nodes. When nodes retrieve a key from a DSHT, they receive only a subset of the values stored. DSHTs are well-suited to indexing the locations of replicated objects, because while many replicas may need to be indexed, those seeking objects really only need to find one good replica."