Spurring Adoption of DHTs with OpenHash, a Public DHT Service

The past three years have seen intense research into Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs): both into algorithms for building them, and into applications built atop them. These applications have spanned a strikingly wide range, including file systems [4, 6, 10], event notification [11], content distribution [2], e-mail delivery [12], indirection services [17, 16], web caches [7], and relational query processors [9]. While this set of applications is impressively diverse, the vast majority of application building is done by a small community of DHT researchers. If DHTs are to have a positive impact on the design of distributed applications used by real users outside this research community, we believe that the community of DHT-based application developers should be as broad as possible.