WORK IN PROGRESS

PartitionMap maps arbitrary terms to a set of contiguous and dynamic (but deterministic) partitions. It's intended as a hash table for distributed systems.

The general goal is to assign every possible term to a set of known buckets, without the O(N) size requirement of a Map.

You can think of PartitionMap like Consistent Hashing but with a couple of key advantages:

• dynamic number of partitions
• dynamically sized partitions
• pluggable slicing strategies for application-specific optimizations
• doesn't conflate partition assignment with replication policies

There's a great article by @slfritchie on the topic: A Critique of Resizable Hash Tables: Riak Core & Random Slicing

PartitionMap takes heavy inspiration and uses the "CutShift" algorithm from "Random slicing: Efficient and scalable data placement for large-scale storage systems."

PartitionMap works by hashing the given term into a fixed-size range of integer keys, the hash lands inside one of many contiguous intervals of integers (partitions).

Each partition belongs to an "owner", each owner owns a configurable proportion of the total hash space.

A graphical example:

 owner1     o2           o1           o1       o2        o1             o2
   v        v            v            v        v         v              v
<- p1 ->|<- p2 ->|<----- p3 ----->|<- p4 ->|<- p5 ->|<-- p6 -->|<------ p7 ------>|
|-------|--------|----------------|--------|--------|----------|------------------|
^  ^        ^        ^       ^           ^               ^                        ^
0  |        |        |       |           |               |                   2**32 (phash2)
   |        |        |       |           |               |
 "abcd"  <<1,2>>    "z"  %{a: 123}      500        {:ok, [1, 2, 3]}

So, the terms "z" and %{a: 123} are both mapped to the same partition.

The package can be installed by adding partition_map to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:partition_map, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

The docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/partition_map.