Implementing Lock-Free Concurrent B-Trees for High-Throughput Vector Indexing in Distributed Systems
Introduction Vector indexing—whether for similarity search in recommendation engines, nearest‑neighbor queries in machine‑learning pipelines, or high‑dimensional feature retrieval in bioinformatics—has become a core workload in modern distributed systems. Traditional indexing structures (KD‑trees, LSH tables, inverted files) either suffer from poor cache locality or become bottlenecks when many threads try to update or query simultaneously. Enter the lock‑free concurrent B‑tree. By marrying the proven I/O‑optimal layout of B‑trees with the non‑blocking guarantees of lock‑free algorithms, we can achieve: ...