Compressed Suffix Arrays for Massive Data

Abstract. We present a fast space-efficient algorithm for constructing compressed suffix arrays (CSA). The algorithm requires O(n logn) time in the worst case, and only O(n) bits of extra space in addition to the CSA. As the basic step, we describe an algorithm for merging two CSAs. We show that the construction algorithm can be parallelized in a sym-metric multiprocessor system, and discuss the possibility of a distributed implementation. We also describe a parallel implementation of the algo-rithm, capable of indexing several gigabytes per hour.