Fast and Lightweight Distributed Suffix Array Construction

The suffix array contains the lexicographical order of all suffixes of a text. It is one of the most well-studied text indices with applications in bioinformatics, compression, and pattern matching. The main bottleneck of distributed-memory suffix array construction algorithms is their memory requirements. Even careful implementations require 30×-60× the input size as working memory. We present a scalable and lightweight distributed-memory adaptation of the difference cover (DCX) suffix array construction algorithm. Our approach relies on novel bucketing and random chunk redistribution techniques which reduce our memory requirement to 20×-26× the input size for medium-sized inputs and to 14×-15× for large-sized inputs. Regarding running time, we achieve speedups of up to 5× over current state-of-the-art distributed suffix array construction algorithms.