A Survey of Hashing Techniques for High Performance Computing

Abstract

Hashing is a well-known and widely used technique for providing O(1) access to large files on secondary storage and tables in memory. Hashing techniques were introduced in the early 60s. The term hash function historically is used to denote a function that compresses a string of arbitrary input to a string of fixed length. Hashing finds applications in other fields such as fuzzy matching, error checking, authentication, cryptography, and networking. Hashing techniques have found application to provide faster access in routing tables, with the increase in the size of the routing tables. More recently, hashing has found applications in transactional memory in hardware. Motivated by these newly emerged applications of hashing, in this paper we present a survey of hashing techniques starting from traditional hashing methods with greater emphasis on the recent developments. We provide a brief explanation on hardware hashing and a brief introduction to transactional memory.