Persistent Non-Blocking Binary Search Trees Supporting Wait-Free Range Queries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel wait-free binary search tree supporting efficient range queries, insertions, deletions, and finds in asynchronous shared-memory systems, ensuring linearizability and crash tolerance.

Contribution

It extends Ellen et al.'s non-blocking BST with persistence and wait-free range queries, enabling concurrent operations without interference.

Findings

Supports wait-free range queries and non-blocking updates

Operates correctly in crash-prone asynchronous systems

Allows fully parallel insert and delete operations on different tree parts

Abstract

This paper presents the first implementation of a search tree data structure in an asynchronous shared-memory system that provides a wait-free algorithm for executing range queries on the tree, in addition to non-blocking algorithms for Insert, Delete and Find, using single-word Compare-and-Swap (CAS). The implementation is linearizable and tolerates any number of crash failures. Insert and Delete operations that operate on different parts of the tree run fully in parallel (without any interference with one another). We employ a lightweight helping mechanism, where each Insert, Delete and Find operation helps only update operations that affect the local neighbourhood of the leaf it arrives at. Similarly, a Scan helps only those updates taking place on nodes of the part of the tree it traverses, and therefore Scans operating on different parts of the tree do not interfere with one another. Our implementation works in a dynamic system where the number of processes may change over time. The implementation builds upon the non-blocking binary search tree implementation presented by Ellen et al. (in PODC 2010) by applying a simple mechanism to make the tree persistent.