On Extending a Fixed Size, Persistent and Lock-Free Hash Map Design to Store Sorted Keys

Abstract

Searching is a crucial time-consuming part of many programs, and using a good search method instead of a bad one often leads to a substantial increase in performance. Hash tries are a trie-based data structure with nearly ideal characteristics for the implementation of hash maps. In this paper, we present a novel, simple and concurrent hash map design that fully supports the concurrent search, insert and remove operations on hash tries designed to store sorted keys. To the best of our knowledge, our design is the first concurrent hash map design that puts together the following characteristics: (i) use fixed size data structures; (ii) use persistent memory references; (iii) be lock-free; and (iv) store sorted keys. Experimental results show that our design is quite competitive when compared against other state-of-the-art designs implemented in Java.