"An important distinction to make while reading this
paper is between the protocols described and the ideas
underlying them. The protocols are
primarily intended to motivate the underlying notion of
Consistent Hashing and to admit a tractable analysis.
Therefore, these protocols are over-simplified, and may
not be completely practical. However, we do believe that
they contain valuable components that can be applied in
real world systems by the relevant experts."
-- Karger et. al.
September 8, 1997 draft of
"Consistent Hashing: Load Balancing with Incomplete Information"
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~karger
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~danl
"valuable components ..." now THERE's an understatement!
The stock market valued it at $15 billion according to the October 29
story that Rohit fork'd
http://news.cnet.com/category/0-1004-200-1425011.html
That draft was eventually published in the WWW8 proceedings:
Web Caching with Consistent Hashing
http://www8.org/w8-papers/2a-webserver/caching/paper2.html
There's a related presentation:
Consistent Hashing: Load Balancing in a Changing World
7/1/97
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~karger/Papers/Talks/Hash/index.htm
I think it was given at the W3C push workshop
http://www.w3.org/Architecture/9709_Workshop/
And folks said that workshop never went anywhere...
-- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/