A high-throughput in-memory index, durable on flash-based SSD: Insights into the winning solution of the SIGMOD programming contest 2011

Abstract

Growing memory capacities and the increasing number of cores on modern hardware enforces the design of new in-memory indexing structures that reduce the number of memory transfers and minimizes the need for locking to allow massive parallel access. However, most applications depend on hard durability constraints requiring a persistent medium like SSDs, which shorten the latency and throughput gap between main memory and hard disks. In this paper, we present our winning solution of the SIGMOD Programming Contest 2011. It consists of an in-memory indexing structure that provides a balanced read/write performance as well as non-blocking reads and single-lock writes. Complementary to this index, we describe an SSD-optimized logging approach to fit hard durability requirements at a high throughput rate