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Non-blocking Patricia tries with replace operations

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Abstract

This paper presents a non-blocking Patricia trie implementation for an asynchronous shared-memory system using Compare&Swap. The trie is a linearizable implementation of a set and supports three update operations: insert adds an element to the trie, delete removes an element from the trie and replace replaces one element by another. The replace operation is interesting because it changes two different locations of a trie. We design a mechanism that allows the two changes of a replace operation to appear to be executed atomically. If all update operations modify different parts of the trie, they run completely concurrently. The implementation also supports a wait-free find operation, which only reads shared memory and never changes the data structure. Our implementation and its correctness proof are modular and can be adapted for other data structures. Empirically, we compare our algorithms to some existing tree-based set implementations and our results show that our trie performs consistently well in different scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

I thank my supervisor, Eric Ruppert for his great guidance, advice and support, Trevor Brown for providing lots of help and code for the experiments, Michael L. Scott for giving us access to his multicore machines and the anonymous referees for their constructive comments.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University, Toronto, Canada

    Niloufar Shafiei

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  1. Niloufar Shafiei
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Correspondence to Niloufar Shafiei.

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A preliminary version of this paper appeared at ICDCS [33].

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Shafiei, N. Non-blocking Patricia tries with replace operations. Distrib. Comput. 32, 423–442 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-019-00347-1

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