Fast, Parallel, and Cache-Friendly Suffix Array Construction

String indexes such as the suffix array (SA) and the closely related longest common prefix (LCP) array are fundamental objects in bioinformatics and have a wide variety of applications. Despite their importance in practice, few scalable parallel algorithms for constructing these are known, and the existing algorithms can be highly non-trivial to implement and parallelize. In this paper we present CaPS-SA, a simple and scalable parallel algorithm for constructing these string indexes inspired by samplesort. Due to its design, CaPS-SA has excellent memory-locality and thus incurs fewer cache misses and achieves strong performance on modern multicore systems with deep cache hierarchies. We show that despite its simple design, CaPS-SA outperforms existing state-of-the-art parallel SA and LCP-array construction algorithms on modern hardware. Finally, motivated by applications in modern aligners where the query strings have bounded lengths, we introduce the notion of a bounded-context SA and show that CaPS-SA can easily be extended to exploit this structure to obtain further speedups

Lyndon Words Accelerate Suffix Sorting

Suffix sorting is arguably the most fundamental building block in string algorithmics, like regular sorting in the broader field of algorithms. It is thus not surprising that the literature is full of algorithms for suffix sorting, in particular focusing on their practicality. However, the advances on practical suffix sorting stalled with the emergence of the DivSufSort algorithm more than 10 years ago, which, up to date, has remained the fastest suffix sorter. This article shows how properties of Lyndon words can be exploited algorithmically to accelerate suffix sorting again. Our new algorithm is 6-19% faster than DivSufSort on real-world texts, and up to three times as fast on artificial repetitive texts. It can also be parallelized, where similar speedups can be observed. Thus, we make the first advances in practical suffix sorting after more than a decade of standstill

Suffix Sorting via Matching Statistics

Funding Information: Academy of Finland grants 339070 and 351150 Publisher Copyright: © Zsuzsanna Lipták, Francesco Masillo, and Simon J. Puglisi.We introduce a new algorithm for constructing the generalized suffix array of a collection of highly similar strings. As a first step, we construct a compressed representation of the matching statistics of the collection with respect to a reference string. We then use this data structure to distribute suffixes into a partial order, and subsequently to speed up suffix comparisons to complete the generalized suffix array. Our experimental evidence with a prototype implementation (a tool we call sacamats) shows that on string collections with highly similar strings we can construct the suffix array in time competitive with or faster than the fastest available methods. Along the way, we describe a heuristic for fast computation of the matching statistics of two strings, which may be of independent interest.Peer reviewe

Prefix-Free Parsing for Building Large Tunnelled Wheeler Graphs

We propose a new technique for creating a space-efficient index for large repetitive text collections, such as pangenomic databases containing sequences of many individuals from the same species. We combine two recent techniques from this area: Wheeler graphs (Gagie et al., 2017) and prefix-free parsing (PFP, Boucher et al., 2019). Wheeler graphs are a general framework encompassing several indexes based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), such as the FM-index. Wheeler graphs admit a succinct representation which can be further compacted by employing the idea of tunnelling, which exploits redundancies in the form of parallel, equally-labelled paths called blocks that can be merged into a single path. The problem of finding the optimal set of blocks for tunnelling, i.e. the one that minimizes the size of the resulting Wheeler graph, is known to be NP-complete and remains the most computationally challenging part of the tunnelling process. To find an adequate set of blocks in less time, we propose a new method based on the prefix-free parsing (PFP). The idea of PFP is to divide the input text into phrases of roughly equal sizes that overlap by a fixed number of characters. The phrases are then sorted lexicographically. The original text is represented by a sequence of phrase ranks (the parse) and a list of all used phrases (the dictionary). In repetitive texts, the PFP representation of the text is generally much shorter than the original since individual phrases are used many times in the parse, thus reducing the size of the dictionary. To speed up the block selection for tunnelling, we apply the PFP to obtain the parse and the dictionary of the original text, tunnel the Wheeler graph of the parse using existing heuristics and subsequently use this tunnelled parse to construct a compact Wheeler graph of the original text. Compared with constructing a Wheeler graph from the original text without PFP, our method is much faster and uses less memory on collections of pangenomic sequences. Therefore, our method enables the use of Wheeler graphs as a pangenomic reference for real-world pangenomic datasets

Prefix-free parsing for building large tunnelled Wheeler graphs

We propose a new technique for creating a space-efficient index for large repetitive text collections, such as pangenomic databases containing sequences of many individuals from the same species. We combine two recent techniques from this area: Wheeler graphs (Gagie et al., 2017) and prefix-free parsing (PFP, Boucher et al., 2019). Wheeler graphs (WGs) are a general framework encompassing several indexes based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), such as the FM-index. Wheeler graphs admit a succinct representation which can be further compacted by employing the idea of tunnelling, which exploits redundancies in the form of parallel, equally-labelled paths called blocks that can be merged into a single path. The problem of finding the optimal set of blocks for tunnelling, i.e. the one that minimizes the size of the resulting WG, is known to be NP-complete and remains the most computationally challenging part of the tunnelling process. To find an adequate set of blocks in less time, we propose a new method based on the prefix-free parsing (PFP). The idea of PFP is to divide the input text into phrases of roughly equal sizes that overlap by a fixed number of characters. The original text is represented by a sequence of phrase ranks (the parse) and a list of all used phrases (the dictionary). In repetitive texts, the PFP of the text is generally much shorter than the original. To speed up the block selection for tunnelling, we apply the PFP to obtain the parse and the dictionary of the text, tunnel the WG of the parse using existing heuristics and subsequently use this tunnelled parse to construct a compact WG of the original text. Compared with constructing a WG from the original text without PFP, our method is much faster and uses less memory on collections of pangenomic sequences. Therefore, our method enables the use of WGs as a pangenomic reference for real-world datasets.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, to be published in the WABI (Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics) 2022 conference proceeding