Faster semi-external suffix sorting

Suffix array (SA) construction is a time-and-memory bottleneck in many string processing applications. In this paper we improve the runtime of a small-space - semi-external - SA construction algorithm by Karkkainen (TCS, 2007) 5]. We achieve a speedup in practice of 2-4 times, without increasing memory usage. Our main contribution is a way to implement the "pointer copying" heuristic, used in less space-efficient SA construction algorithms, in a memory-efficient way. We improve the practical performance of a suffix sorting algorithm due to Karkkainen.We adapt powerful heuristics from large memory to the semi-external setting.We show that the new algorithm has relevant space-time tradeoffs in practice.

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