Concurrent Wait-Free Red Black Trees

• Published in: Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems pp. 45 - 60
• Main Authors: Natarajan, Aravind, Savoie, Lee H., Mittal, Neeraj
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 2013
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 9783319030883; 3319030884
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-03089-0_4

We present a new wait-free algorithm for concurrent manipulation of a red-black tree in an asynchronous shared memory system that supports search, insert, update and delete operations using single-word compare-and-swap instructions. Search operations in our algorithm are fast and execute only read and write instructions (and no atomic instructions) on the shared memory. The algorithm is obtained through a progressive sequence of modifications to an existing general framework for deriving a concurrent wait-free tree-based data structure from its sequential counterpart. Our experiments indicate that our algorithm significantly outperforms other concurrent algorithms for a red-black tree for most workloads.