Brief announcement: A contention-friendly, non-blocking skip list

Abstract

A skip list is a probabilistic data structure to store and retrieve in-memory data in an efficient way. In short, it is a linked structure that diminishes the linear big-oh complexity of a linked list with elements having additional shortcuts pointing towards other elements located further in the list [7]. These shortcuts allow operations to complete in O(log n) steps in expectation. The drawback of employing shortcuts is however to require additional maintenance each time some data is stored or discarded. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.