arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Robert Clausecker.
We present Radsort, a variant of LSD radix sort, sorting data with $\mathcal O(\sqrt n)$ additional space. Radsort is stable, admits a simple implementation and is easy to parallelise. For arrays exceeding a size of around 2 MiB it outperforms a conventional out-of-place LSD radix sort.
UTF-16 is a widely used Unicode encoding representing characters with one or two 16-bit code units. The format relies on surrogate pairs to encode characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane, requiring a high surrogate followed by a low surrogate. Ill-formed UTF-16 strings -- where surrogates are mismatched -- can arise from data corruption or improper encoding, posing security and reliability risks. Consequently, programming languages such as JavaScript include functions to fix ill-formed UTF-16 strings by replacing mismatched surrogates with the Unicode replacement character (U+FFFD). We propose using Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions to handle multiple code units in parallel, enabling faster and more efficient execution. Our software is part of the Google JavaScript engine (V8) and thus part of several major Web browsers.
The block tree [Belazzougui et al., J. Comput. Syst. Sci. '21] is a compressed representation of a length-$n$ text that supports access, rank, and select queries while requiring only $O(z\log\frac{n}{z})$ words of space, where $z$ is the number of Lempel-Ziv factors of the text. In other words, its space-requirements are asymptotically similar to those of the compressed text. In practice, block trees offer comparable query performance to state-of-the-art compressed rank and select indices. However, their construction is significantly slower. Additionally, the fastest construction algorithms require a significant amount of working memory. To address this issue, we propose fast and lightweight parallel algorithms for the efficient construction of block trees. Our algorithm achieves similar speed than the currently fastest construction algorithm on one core and is up to four times faster using 64 cores. It achieves all that while requiring an order of magnitude less memory. As result of independent interest, we present a data parallel algorithm for Karp-Rabin fingerprint computation.
The positional population count operation pospopcnt() counts for an array of w-bit words how often each of the w bits was set. Various applications in bioinformatics, database engineering, and digital processing exist. Building on earlier work by Klarqvist et al., we show how positional population counts can be rapidly computed using SIMD techniques with good performance from the first byte, approaching memory-bound speeds for input arrays of as little as 4 KiB. Improvements include an improved algorithm structure, better handling of unaligned and very short arrays, as well as faster bit-parallel accumulation of intermediate results. We provide a generic algorithm description as well as implementations for various SIMD instruction set extensions, including Intel AVX2, AVX-512, and ARM ASIMD, and discuss the adaption of our algorithm to other platforms.
Intel includes in its recent processors a powerful set of instructions capable of processing 512-bit registers with a single instruction (AVX-512). Some of these instructions have no equivalent in earlier instruction sets. We leverage these instructions to efficiently transcode strings between the most common formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. With our novel algorithms, we are often twice as fast as the previous best solutions. For example, we transcode Chinese text from UTF-8 to UTF-16 at more than 5 GiB/s using fewer than 2 CPU instructions per character. To ensure reproducibility, we make our software freely available as an open source library. Our library is part of the popular Node.js JavaScript runtime.