History
Originally devised by Karger et al. at MIT for use in distributed caching, the idea has now been expanded to other areas also. An academic paper from 1997 introduced the term "consistent hashing" as a way of distributing requests among a changing population of Web servers. Each slot is then represented by a node in a distributed system. The addition (joins) and removal (leaves/failures) of nodes only requires items to be re-shuffled when the number of slots/nodes change.
Consistent hashing has also been used to reduce the impact of partial system failures in large Web applications as to allow for robust caches without incurring the system wide fallout of a failure.
The consistent hashing concept also applies to the design of distributed hash tables (DHTs). DHTs use consistent hashing to partition a keyspace among a distributed set of nodes, and additionally provide an overlay network that connects nodes such that the node responsible for any key can be efficiently located.
Read more about this topic: Consistent Hashing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)