Fast and Space-Efficient In-Memory Indexes (Hash Tables, B-trees)

Cache- and space-efficient in-memory hash tables and ordered indexes for scalable systems.

In-memory indexes — hash tables and ordered structures like B-trees — sit on the critical path of modern data systems. This project designs indexes that are simultaneously fast, space-efficient, and concurrency-friendly.

We built IcebergHT (Pandey et al., 2023), a high-performance hash table with stability and low associativity, and Zombie Hashing (Chesetti et al., 2025), which reclaims the cost of tombstones in deletion-heavy workloads. For ordered data we designed the BP-tree (Xu et al., 2023) and a locality-optimized, concurrent in-memory B-skiplist (Luo et al., 2025), and we have studied how learned indexes perform for external-memory joins (Chesetti & Pandey, 2025).

References

2025

  1. SIGMOD 2025
    Zombie Hashing: Reanimating Tombstones in a Graveyard
    Yuvaraj Chesetti, Benwei Shi, Jeff M. Phillips, and 1 more author
    Proc. ACM Manag. Data, 2025
  2. ICPP 2025
    Bridging Cache-Friendliness and Concurrency: A Locality-Optimized In-Memory B-Skiplist
    Yicong Luo, Senhe Hao, Brian Wheatman, and 2 more authors
    In ICPP 2025, 2025
  3. ACDA 2025
    Evaluating Learned Indexes for External-Memory Joins
    Yuvaraj Chesetti and Prashant Pandey
    In 2025 Proceedings of the Conference on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms (ACDA), 2025

2023

  1. SIGMOD 2023
    IcebergHT: High Performance Hash Tables Through Stability and Low Associativity
    Prashant Pandey, Michael A. Bender, Alex Conway, and 4 more authors
    Proc. ACM Manag. Data, 2023
  2. VLDB 2023
    BP-tree: Overcoming the Point-Range Operation Tradeoff for In-Memory B-trees
    Helen Xu, Amanda Li, Brian Wheatman, and 2 more authors
    Proc. VLDB Endow., 2023