HAT-trie: a cache-conscious trie-based data structure for strings

  • Authors:
  • Nikolas Askitis;Ranjan Sinha

  • Affiliations:
  • RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia;RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

  • Venue:
  • ACSC '07 Proceedings of the thirtieth Australasian conference on Computer science - Volume 62
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Tries are the fastest tree-based data structures for managing strings in-memory, but are space-intensive. The burst-trie is almost as fast but reduces space by collapsing trie-chains into buckets. This is not however, a cache-conscious approach and can lead to poor performance on current processors. In this paper, we introduce the HAT-trie, a cache-conscious trie-based data structure that is formed by carefully combining existing components. We evaluate performance using several real-world datasets and against other high-performance data structures. We show strong improvements in both time and space; in most cases approaching that of the cache-conscious hash table. Our HAT-trie is shown to be the most efficient trie-based data structure for managing variable-length strings in-memory while maintaining sort order.