Abstract
P2P DHT has fast become a rather "classical" research field. The currently popular mindsets are mostly routing-centric, or storage-centric. In this paper, we argue that it maybe more interesting to simply view DHT as a logical space that can dynamically size itself with potentially unlimited amount resources. This is in someway analogous to the virtual memory in any contemporary operating system. We believe that exploring such a perspective will bring about new insights as well as applications. We illustrate the power of this abstraction with a few examples, including self-scaling, self-healing fat tree, self-tune storage system, and a light-weight quorum-based distributed lock protocol which does not assume constant number of members to start with. While their individual utilizations differ radically, all of them are united under this viewpoint.