Practical Trade-Offs for the Prefix-Sum Problem

Abstract: Given an integer array A, the prefix-sum problem is to answer sum(i) queries that return the sum of the elements in A[0..i], knowing that the integers in A can be changed. It is a classic problem in data structure design with a wide range of applications in computing from coding to databases. In this work, we propose and compare several and practical solutions to this problem, showing that new trade-offs between the performance of queries and updates can be achieved on modern hardware.