Linearizability: a correctness condition for concurrent objects
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Skip lists: a probabilistic alternative to balanced trees
Communications of the ACM
The Repeat Offender Problem: A Mechanism for Supporting Dynamic-Sized, Lock-Free Data Structures
DISC '02 Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing
Hazard Pointers: Safe Memory Reclamation for Lock-Free Objects
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Formal verification of a lazy concurrent list-based set algorithm
CAV'06 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Computer Aided Verification
A lazy concurrent list-based set algorithm
OPODIS'05 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems
DISC'09 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Distributed computing
Towards consistency oblivious programming
OPODIS'11 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems
Leaplist: lessons learned in designing tm-supported range queries
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
On the scalability of the Erlang term storage
Proceedings of the twelfth ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Erlang
A contention-friendly binary search tree
Euro-Par'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel Processing
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Because of their highly distributed nature and the lack of global rebalancing, skiplists are becoming an increasingly important logarithmic search structure for concurrent applications. Unfortunately, none of the concurrent skiplist implementations in the literature, whether lock-based or lock-free, have been proven correct. Moreover, the complex structure of these algorithms, most likely the reason for a lack of a proof, is a barrier to software designers that wish to extend and modify the algorithms or base new structures on them. This paper proposes a simple new lock-based concurrent skiplist algorithm. Unlike other concurrent skiplist algorithms, this algorithm preserves the skiplist properties at all times, which facilitates reasoning about its correctness. Though it is lock-based, the algorithm is highly scalable due to a novel use of optimistic synchronization: it searches without acquiring locks, requiring only a short lock-based validation before adding or removing nodes. Experimental evidence shows that this simpler algorithm performs as well as the best previously known lock-free algorithm under the most common search patterns.