The Chord Project

Chord is a flexible lookup primitive intended for use in peer-to-peer environments. The Chord primitive maps keys to servers in a decentralized manner and requires only log(N) messages to perform the mapping where N is the number of nodes in the system.

We have used Chord to build a peer-to-peer file system but Chord can be used in a wide variety of peer-to-peer applications.

• Downloads
  

  An experimental implementation of Chord is now available via anonymous CVS. The Chord HOWTO describes how to download and compile the software.

• Publications

  Frank Dabek A Cooperative File System, Master's Thesis, September, 2001, PostScript, PDF.

  Frank Dabek, M. Frans Kaashoek, David Karger, Robert Morris, and Ion Stoica, Wide-area cooperative storage with CFS, ACM SOSP 2001, Banff, October 2001. Abstract, PostScript, PDF.

  Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, and Hari Balakrishnan, Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications, ACM SIGCOMM 2001, San Deigo, CA, August 2001. Abstract, PostScript, PDF.

  Frank Dabek, Emma Brunskill, M. Frans Kaashoek, David Karger, Robert Morris, Ion Stoica, and Hari Balakrishnan, Building Peer-to-Peer Systems With Chord, a Distributed Lookup Service, Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VIII), May 2001. Abstract, PostScript, PDF.

  MIT TR This LCS Tech Report describes the Chord algorithm in detail. This report is currently being reworked to include updates to the algorithm. It will return soon.

• Contact us

  We welcome feedback, suggestions, patches, and so forth. Email them to chord@pdos.lcs.mit.edu.

- The Chord developers:
Frans Kaashoek
Robert Morris
Frank Dabek
Ion Stoica
Emma Brunskill
David Karger