Scalable Construction of Text Indexes

Abstract: The suffix array is the key to efficient solutions for myriads of string processing problems in different applications domains, like data compression, data mining, or Bioinformatics. With the rapid growth of available data, suffix array construction algorithms had 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 us to process input sizes in orders of magnitude that have not been considered before.