Package hrw provides an implementation of Highest Random Weight hashing, an alternative to consistent hashing which is both simple and fast. HRW allows you to consistently select the same nodes (or sets of nodes) for a given key. When a node is removed from the set of available nodes, only the data is was responsible for is at all affected. For more details on HRW hashing, see http://www.eecs.umich.edu/techreports/cse/96/CSE-TR-316-96.pdf or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_hashing.