ELB-trees an efficient and lock-free B-tree derivative

As computer systems scale in the number of processors, scalable data structures with good parallel performance become increasingly important. Lock-free data structures promise such improved parallel performance at the expense of higher algorithmic complexity and higher sequential execution time overhead. All lock-free data structures are based on simple atomic operations that, though supported by modern processors, are expensive in execution time. We present a lock-free data structure, ELB-trees, which under certain assumptions can be used as multimaps as well as priority queues. Specifically it cannot store duplicate key-value pairs, and it is not linearizable. Compared to existing data structures, ELB-trees require fewer atomic operations leading to improved performance. We measure the parallel performance of ELB-trees using a set of benchmarks and observe that ELB-trees are up to almost 30 times faster than library multimap implementations.