Technical reports
Non-blocking hashtables with open addressing
Chris Purcell, Tim Harris
September 2005, 23 pages
DOI: 10.48456/tr-639
Abstract
We present the first non-blocking hashtable based on open addressing that provides the following benefits: it combines good cache locality, accessing a single cacheline if there are no collisions, with short straight-line code; it needs no storage overhead for pointers and memory allocator schemes, having instead an overhead of two words per bucket; it does not need to periodically reorganise or replicate the table; and it does not need garbage collection, even with arbitrary-sized keys. Open problems include resizing the table and replacing, rather than erasing, entries. The result is a highly-concurrent set algorithm that approaches or outperforms the best externally-chained implementations we tested, with fixed memory costs and no need to select or fine-tune a garbage collector or locking strategy.
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BibTeX record
@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-639, author = {Purcell, Chris and Harris, Tim}, title = {{Non-blocking hashtables with open addressing}}, year = 2005, month = sep, url = {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-639.pdf}, institution = {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory}, doi = {10.48456/tr-639}, number = {UCAM-CL-TR-639} }