The counting pyramid: an adaptive distributed counting scheme

Abstract

A distributed counter is a concurrent object which provides a fetch-and-increment operation on a shared value. On the basis of a distributed counter, one can implement various fundamental data structures, such as queues or stacks. We present the counting pyramid, an efficient implementation of a distributed counter in a message passing system, which is based on software combining. The counting pyramid adapts gracefully to changing access patterns, guarantees linearizability, and offers more general fetch-and- Φ operations. We analyze the expected performance of the counting pyramid, using queueing theory and simulation. We show that the latency of the counting pyramid is asymptotically optimal.