[tryp]

One point to consider is that this algorithm appears to rely on a double-precision floating-point divide at its core, so the speediness measured on a Xeon E5 may not translate to speediness on architectures with weaker floating point units.

[def-lkb]

The purpose of reals is just to map from [0-1) to [0-n) where n is the number of hosts.

Floating points are used to ease the presentation, I think the algorithm can be ported to integer operations without loss of performance (didn't prove it, I just tried to write a pure integer implementation and checked distribution of results on some inputs).