Comparing integer data structures for 32 and 64 bit keys

  • Authors:

  • Nicholas Nash;David Gregg

  • Affiliations:

  • Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • WEA'08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Experimental algorithms
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In this paper we experimentally compare a number of data structures operating over keys that are 32 and 64-bit integers. We examine traditional comparison-based search trees as well as data structures that take advantage of the fact that the keys are integers, such as van Emde Boas trees and various trie-based data structures. We propose a variant of a burst trie that performs better in both time and space than all the alternative data structures. Burst tries have previously been shown to provide a very efficient base for implementing cache efficient string sorting algorithms. We find that with suitable engineering they also perform excellently as a dynamic ordered data structure operating over integer keys. We provide experimental results when the data structures operate over uniform random data. We also provide a motivating example for our study in Valgrind, a widely used suite of tools for the dynamic binary instrumentation of programs, and present experimental results over data sets derived from Valgrind.