Practical Trade-Offs for the Prefix-Sum Problem

TL;DR

This paper explores practical solutions for the prefix-sum problem, demonstrating new trade-offs between query and update performance on modern hardware, with implications for various computing applications.

Contribution

It introduces and compares several practical data structures for prefix sums, highlighting novel performance trade-offs tailored for current hardware architectures.

Findings

New data structures achieve better query-update trade-offs.

Practical solutions outperform traditional methods on modern hardware.

Trade-offs depend on specific application requirements.

Abstract

Given an integer array A, the prefix-sum problem is to answer sum(i) queries that return the sum of the elements in A[0..i], knowing that the integers in A can be changed. It is a classic problem in data structure design with a wide range of applications in computing from coding to databases. In this work, we propose and compare several and practical solutions to this problem, showing that new trade-offs between the performance of queries and updates can be achieved on modern hardware.