Scaling Linearizable Range Queries on Modern Multi-Cores

In this paper we introduce Range Query Timestamp Counter (RQ-TSC), a general approach to provide scalable and linearizable range query operations for highly concurrent lock-based data structures. RQ-TSC is a multi-versioned building block that relies on hardware timestamps (e.g., obtained through hardware timestamp counter register on x86_64) to generate version timestamps, which greatly reduce a point of contention on a shared atomic counter. To evaluate the performance of RQ-TSC, we apply it to three data structures: a linked list, a skip list, and a binary search tree. Experiments show that our approach can improve scalability significantly. Moreover, in almost all cases, range queries on these data structures built from our design perform as well as or better than state-of-the-art concurrent data structures that support linearizable range queries.