Concurrent wait-free red black trees

Abstract

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. © Springer International Publishing 2013.