Figured I’d drop in the establishing paper for CoralCDN, Sloppy hashing and self-organizing clusters. Coral sought to optimize DHTs by helping peers discover other peers in their network proximity. Furthermore, by introducing a notion of “sloppy hashing” and capacity for peers, Coral distributed loads more evenly across a cluster by leaving a breadcrumb trail of copies of a piece of data along the lookup path it used to find a peer closest to a piece of data.
We hope to integrate Coral’s clusters as one instance of what I’m currently thinking of as “DHT overlay networks”, a mechanism through which peers can opt in to specific subsets of the data being stored in our universal DHT.