Data writers desiring to update data without unduly impacting concurrent readers perform a synchronization operation with respect to plural processors or execution threads. The synchronization operation is parallelized using a hierarchical tree having a root node, one or more levels of internal nodes and as many leaf nodes as there are processors or threads. The tree is traversed from the root node to a lowest level of the internal nodes and the following node processing is performed for each node: (1) check the node's children, (2) if the children are leaf nodes, perform the synchronization operation relative to each leaf node's associated processor or thread, and (3) if the children are internal nodes, fan out and repeat the node processing with each internal node representing a new root node. The foregoing node processing is continued until all processors or threads associated with the leaf nodes have performed the synchronization operation.