Scalable String and Suffix Sorting: Algorithms, Techniques, and Tools

This dissertation focuses on two fundamental sorting problems: string sorting and suffix sorting. The first part considers parallel string sorting on shared-memory multi-core machines, the second part external memory suffix sorting using the induced sorting principle, and the third part distributed external memory suffix sorting with a new distributed algorithmic big data framework named Thrill.Comment: 396 pages, dissertation, Karlsruher Instituts f\"ur Technologie (2018). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1101.3448 by other author

Engineering Parallel String Sorting

We discuss how string sorting algorithms can be parallelized on modern multi-core shared memory machines. As a synthesis of the best sequential string sorting algorithms and successful parallel sorting algorithms for atomic objects, we first propose string sample sort. The algorithm makes effective use of the memory hierarchy, uses additional word level parallelism, and largely avoids branch mispredictions. Then we focus on NUMA architectures, and develop parallel multiway LCP-merge and -mergesort to reduce the number of random memory accesses to remote nodes. Additionally, we parallelize variants of multikey quicksort and radix sort that are also useful in certain situations. Comprehensive experiments on five current multi-core platforms are then reported and discussed. The experiments show that our implementations scale very well on real-world inputs and modern machines.Comment: 46 pages, extension of "Parallel String Sample Sort" arXiv:1305.115

Scalable Construction of Text Indexes with Thrill

The suffix array is the key to efficient solutions for myriads of string processing problems in different application domains, like data compression, data mining, or bioinformatics. With the rapid growth of available data, suffix array construction algorithms have to be adapted to advanced computational models such as external memory and distributed computing. In this article, we present five suffix array construction algorithms utilizing the new algorithmic big data batch processing framework Thrill, which allows scalable processing of input sizes on distributed systems in orders of magnitude that have not been considered before

Inducing Suffix and LCP Arrays in External Memory

We consider full text index construction in external memory (EM). Our first contribution is an inducing algorithm for suffix arrays in external memory, which utilizes an efficient EM priority queue and runs in sorting complexity. Practical tests show that this algorithm outperforms the previous best EM suffix sorter [Dementiev et al., JEA 2008] by a factor of about two in time and I/O-volume. Our second contribution is to augment the first algorithm to also construct the array of longest common prefixes (LCPs). This yields the first EM construction algorithm for LCP arrays. The overhead in time and I/O volume for this extended algorithm over plain suffix array construction is roughly two. Our algorithms scale far beyond problem sizes previously considered in the literature (text size of 80 GiB using only 4 GiB of RAM in our experiments).