ESH: Design and Implementation of an Optimal Hashing Scheme for Persistent Memory

Abstract

Recent advancements in memory technology have opened up a wealth of possibilities for innovation in data structures. The emergence of byte-addressable persistent memory (PM) with its impressive capacity and low latency has accelerated the adoption of PM in existing hashing-based indexes. As a result, several new hashing schemes utilizing emulators have been proposed. However, these schemes have proven to be suboptimal, lacking scalability when implemented on real devices. Only a handful of hash table designs have successfully addressed critical properties such as load factor, scalability, efficient memory utilization, and recovery. One of the main challenges in redesigning data structures for an effective hashing scheme in PM is minimizing the overhead associated with dynamic hashing operations in the hash table. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces ESH, an efficient and scalable hashing scheme that significantly improves memory efficiency, scalability, and overall performance on PM. The ESH scheme maximizes the utilization of the hash table’s available space, thus reducing the frequency of full-table rehashing and improving performance. Consequently, this scheme achieves a high load factor while minimizing the need for rehashing. To evaluate the effectiveness of the ESH scheme, we compare it to widely used dynamic hashing schemes employing similar techniques on Intel Optane® DC persistent memory (DCPMM). The experimental results demonstrate that ESH outperforms CCEH and Dash in terms of data insertion performance, exhibiting a 30% improvement over CCEH and a 4% improvement over Dash. Furthermore, ESH improves the lookup operation by nearly 10% compared to Dash, while achieving a load factor of up to 91%, surpassing its competitors.