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2011 Technical Reports

Non-blocking k-ary Search Trees

Trevor Brown and Joanna Helga

Technical Report CSE-2011-04

York University

June 2011

Abstract

This paper presents the first concurrent non-blocking k-ary search tree. Our data structure generalizes the recent non-blocking binary search tree of Ellen et al. to trees in which each internal node has k children. Larger values of k decrease the depth of the tree, but lead to higher contention among processes performing updates to the tree. Our Java implementation uses single-word compare-and-set operations to coordinate updates to the tree. We present experimental results from two machines. The first one is a 32-core Intel machine with 32 hardware threads available, and the second machine is a 16-core Sun machine with 128 hardware contexts. The experimental results show that our implementation achieves higher throughput than the Java class library's non-blocking skip list. Our implementation also outperforms the lock-based AVL tree of Bronson et al., which is the leading concurrent search tree. Our experimental results show that our algorithm scales extremely well.

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