What is "anycast"?

Came across the term "anycast" when researching Managed DNS yesterday. Sounded interesting so looked it up. It was interesting. This is basically a routing methodology where the sender sends a data packet to that receiver which is topologically closest among multiple receivers. Wow! That was quite a mouthful :)

It's use in DNS? Think of a clustered DNS nameserver environment. When there is a request for an IP address, the anycast mechanism enables the system to route the request to the server which is geographically closest to the sender, i.e. the route with minimum hops. This ensures lower latency, i.e. faster speed.