Space-efficient, high-performance rank and select structures on uncompressed bit sequences

Abstract

Rank & select data structures are one of the fundamental building blocks for many modern succinct data structures. With the continued growth of massive-scale information services, the space efficiency of succinct data structures is becoming increasingly attractive in practice. In this paper, we re-examine the design of rank & select data structures from the bottom up, applying an architectural perspective to optimize their operation. We present our results in the form of a recipe for constructing space and time efficient rank & select data structures for a given hardware architecture. By adopting a cache-centric design approach, our rank & select structures impose space overhead as low as the most space-efficient, but slower, prior designs - only 3.2% and 0.39% extra space respectively - while offering performance competitive with the highest-performance prior designs. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.