Towards a Lock-Free, Fixed Size and Persistent Hash Map Design

Abstract

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 scalable hash trie map design that fully supports the concurrent search, insert and remove operations on hash maps. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first concurrent hash map design that puts together the following characteristics: (i) be lock-free; (ii) use fixed size data structures; and (iii) maintain the access to all internal data structures as persistent memory references. Experimental results show that our proposal is quite competitive when compared against other state-of-the-art proposals implemented in Java. Its design is modular enough to allow different types of configurations aimed for different performances in memory usage and execution time.