What is Chord?
Chord is a peer-to-peer lookup algorithm. It allows a distributed set of participants to agree on a single node as a rendezvous point for a given key, without any central coordination. In particular, it provides a distributed evaluation of the successor(ID) function: given the identifier of a key ID, the successor function returns the address of the node whose identifier most closely follows ID in a circular identifier space. The identifier space is typically a 160-bit number. The Chord algorithm handles adjusting this mapping as the population of nodes changes over time. More details are described in publications found at our publications page. Chord has been used to build a block storage infrastructure, naming services and various file sharing systems. Chord is sometimes referred as a distributed hash table; however, the Chord algorithm itself does not specify any mechanism for storage of data. That is the role of DHash.
