Pivotal B plus tree for Byte-Addressable Persistent Memory

Abstract

Over the past few years, various indexes have been redesigned for byte-addressable persistent memory. In this work, we design and implement PB+tree (Pivotal B+tree) that resolves the limitations of state-of-the-art fully persistent B+trees. First, PB+tree reduces the number of expensive shift operations by up to half by managing two sub-arrays separated by a pivot key. Second, PB+tree reads cachelines in ascending order, which makes PB+tree benefit from hardware prefetchers and run faster than state-of-the-art persistent B+trees that access cachelines in non-contiguous or descending order. Third, PB+tree employs an optimistic lock-free search algorithm to avoid repeatedly visiting the same tree node. Although the optimistic lock-free search algorithm involves a risk of visiting incorrect child nodes, PB+tree guarantees correct search results using the lazy correction algorithm using doubly linked sibling pointers. Our performance study shows that PB+tree outperforms the state-of-the-art fully persistent indexes by a large margin. A search algorithm without optimistic locking risks visiting the wrong child node, but PB+tree uses a lazy correction algorithm with doubly linked sibling pointers to ensure correct search results. Our performance studies show that PB+trees outperform state-of-the-art fully persistent indexes.