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Abstract

Suffix arrays are a simple and powerful data structure for text processing that can be used for full text indexes, data compression, and many other applications in particular in bioinformatics. However, so far it looked prohibitive to build suffix arrays for huge inputs that do not fit into main memory. This paper presents design, analysis, implementation, and experimental evaluation of several new and improved algorithms for suffix array construction. The algorithms are asymptotically optimal in the worst case or on the average. Our implementation can construct suffix arrays for inputs of up to 4GByte in hours on a low cost machine where all previous implementations we are aware of would fail or take days. We also present a simple and efficient external algorithm for checking whether an array of indexes is a suffix array. As a tool of possible independent interest we present a systematic way to design, analyze, and implement \emph{pipelined} algorithms.