Faster External Memory LCP Array Construction

The suffix array, perhaps the most important data structure in modern string processing, needs to be augmented with the longest-common-prefix (LCP) array in many applications. Their construction is often a major bottleneck especially when the data is too big for internal memory. We describe two new algorithms for computing the LCP array from the suffix array in external memory. Experiments demonstrate that the new algorithms are about a factor of two faster than the fastest previous algorithm.