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Summary: On Sorting Strings in External Memory
(extended Abstract)
Lars Arge
Paolo Ferragina
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Roberto Grossi
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Jeffrey Scott Vitter
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Abstract. In this paper we address for the first time the I/O
complexity of the problem of sorting strings in external mem-
ory, which is a fundamental component of many large-scale
text applications. In the standard unit-cost RAM comparison
model, the complexity of sorting ¤ strings of total length ¥
is ¦¨§©¤¤¨¥! . By analogy, in the external memory (or
I/O) model, where the internal memory has size " and the
block transfer size is # , it would be natural to guess that the
I/O complexity of sorting strings is ¦¨§%$&'()1032 & $&465&7 ,
but the known algorithms do not come even close to achiev-
ing this bound. Our results show, somewhat counterintu-
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