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:
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)