[infinispan-dev] abstracting key locating, asymmetric clusters

Hi all, I just want to share some thoughts on Infinispan. Probably you already had similar ideas, maybe you can provide some keywords, so I can search for discussions in the archive. As I understand, the ConsistentHash works just as a consistent hash based "locator" for keys in the cluster. Basically one could implement full replication with a special ConsistentHash that always returns all addresses in the cluster. A ConsistentHash/"locator" has to be uniform over the entire cluster to make it work. In principle this is the only requirement for a "locator". Currently there is only one parameter for the "locator" - a set with all nodes in the cluster. If there would be a way to pass (maybe dynamically) more parameters to a "locator" in a consistent way, many possibilities would open up: e.g. an asymmetric cache configuration by feeding the locator with a distributed registry; switching hash functions at runtime; subscribable keys; keys, that have to stay at a special node... Also it may be possible to remove the replication mode and instead provide a special locator. To make this work rebalancing would have to be more fine grained. E.g. it should be possible for the locator (or its manager?) to ignore a view change or to trigger some rebalance work per cache. What do you think about it? Cheers, Christian