Parallel and Distributed Compressed Indexes

Luís Russo, Gonzalo Navarro, and Arlindo Oliveira

We study parallel and distributed compressed indexes. Compressed indexes are a new and functional way to index text strings. They exploit the compressibility of the text, so that their size is a function of the compressed text size. Moreover, these indexes support a considerable amount of functions, more than many classical indexes. We make use of this extended functionality to obtain, in a shared-memory parallel machine, near-optimal speedups for solving several stringology problems. We also show how to distribute compressed suffix arrays and trees across several machines.