Technical Perspective: Where Is My Data?

Membership in ACM includes a subscription to Communications of the ACM (CACM), the computing industry's most trusted source for staying connected to the world of advanced computing. Technical Perspective: Where Is My Data? Smash: Flexible, Fast, and Resource-Efficient Placement and Lookup of Distributed Storage, by Yi Liu et al., introduces a storage system that is the first of its kind to apply minimal perfect hashing (MPH) to storage research. When making a storage system distributed across many machines, designers are faced with a critical question: Where is my data? At the heart of every storage system is a mechanism for determining where to find data based on an identifier.