As other fundamental programming abstractions in energy-efficient computing,
search trees are expected to support both high parallelism and data locality.
However, existing highly-concurrent search trees such as red-black trees and
AVL trees do not consider data locality while existing locality-aware search
trees such as those based on the van Emde Boas layout (vEB-based trees), poorly
support concurrent (update) operations.
This paper presents DeltaTree, a practical locality-aware concurrent search
tree that combines both locality-optimisation techniques from vEB-based trees
and concurrency-optimisation techniques from non-blocking highly-concurrent
search trees. DeltaTree is a k-ary leaf-oriented tree of DeltaNodes in which
each DeltaNode is a size-fixed tree-container with the van Emde Boas layout.
The expected memory transfer costs of DeltaTree's Search, Insert, and Delete
operations are O(logBN), where N,B are the tree size and the unknown
memory block size in the ideal cache model, respectively. DeltaTree's Search
operation is wait-free, providing prioritised lanes for Search operations, the
dominant operation in search trees. Its Insert and {\em Delete} operations are
non-blocking to other Search, Insert, and Delete operations, but they may be
occasionally blocked by maintenance operations that are sometimes triggered to
keep DeltaTree in good shape. Our experimental evaluation using the latest
implementation of AVL, red-black, and speculation friendly trees from the
Synchrobench benchmark has shown that DeltaTree is up to 5 times faster than
all of the three concurrent search trees for searching operations and up to 1.6
times faster for update operations when the update contention is not too high