A Distributed Hash Table using One-sided Communication in MPI

Abstract

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) can be applied to implement data structures that are distributed across process memory, such as distributed arrays or hash tables. In this paper a hash table implementation is described that employs one-sided communication in case of collision-free access. Collisions of data entries within the hash table are treated using dynamic overflow memory and two-sided communication. This leads to a two-level communication architecture that combines one-sided and two-sided operations in a data structure and the related access operations. This approach circumvents the problem of dynamic and unforeseen size and arrangement of data structures in shared memory that would be hard to manage using solely one-sided communication.