In-place Heap Construction with Optimized Comparisons, Moves, and Cache Misses

We show how to build a binary heap in-place in linear time by performing ˜ 1.625n element comparisons, at most ˜ 2.125n element moves, and ˜ n/B cache misses, where n is the size of the input array, B the capacity of the cache line, and ˜ f(n) approaches f(n) as n grows. The same bound for element comparisons was derived and conjectured to be optimal by Gonnet and Munro; however, their procedure requires Θ(n) pointers and does not have optimal cache behaviour. Our main idea is to mimic the Gonnet-Munro algorithm by converting a navigation pile into a binary heap. To construct a binary heap in-place, we use this algorithm to build bottom heaps of size $\Theta(\lg n)$ and adjust the heap order at the upper levels using Floyd's sift-down procedure. On another frontier, we compare different heap-construction alternatives in practice.