Engineering Burstsort: Toward fast in-place string sorting

Abstract

Burstsort is a trie-based string sorting algorithm that distributes strings into small buckets whose contents are then sorted in cache. This approach has earlier been demonstrated to be efficient on modern cache-based processors [Sinha & Zobel, JEA 2004]. In this article, we introduce improvements that reduce by a significant margin the memory requirement of Burstsort: It is now less than 1% greater than an in-place algorithm. These techniques can be applied to existing variants of Burstsort, as well as other string algorithms such as for string management. We redesigned the buckets, introducing sub-buckets and an index structure for them, which resulted in an order-of-magnitude space reduct..