Paper detail

On the Optimisation of the GSACA Suffix Array Construction Algorithm

The suffix array is arguably one of the most important data structures in sequence analysis and consequently there is a multitude of suffix sorting algorithms. However, to this date the GSACA algorithm introduced in 2015 is the only known non-recursive linear-time suffix array construction algorithm (SACA). Despite its interesting theoretical properties, there has been little effort in improving the algorithm's subpar real-world performance. There is a super-linear algorithm DSH which relies on the same sorting principle and is faster than DivSufSort, the fastest SACA for over a decade. This paper is concerned with analysing the sorting principle used in GSACA and DSH and exploiting its properties in order to give an optimised linear-time algorithm. Our resulting algorithm is not only significantly faster than GSACA but also outperforms DivSufSort and DSH.