SIMDCompressionAndIntersection

A C++ library to compress and intersect sorted lists of integers using SIMD instructions

330
51
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SIMDCompressionAndIntersection

Ubuntu 22.04 CI (GCC 11)
VisualStudio

As the name suggests, this is a C/C++ library for fast
compression and intersection of lists of sorted integers using
SIMD instructions. The library focuses on innovative techniques
and very fast schemes, with particular attention to differential
coding. It introduces new SIMD intersections schemes such as
SIMD Galloping.

This library can decode at least 4 billions of compressed integers per second on most
desktop or laptop processors. That is, it can decompress data at a rate of 15 GB/s.
This is significantly faster than generic codecs like gzip, LZO, Snappy or LZ4.

Authors: Leonid Boystov, Nathan Kurz, Daniel Lemire,
Owen Kaser, Andrew Consroe, Shlomi Vaknin, Christoph Rupp, Bradley Grainger, and others.

Documentation

This work has also inspired other work such as…

Simple demo

Check out example.cpp

You can run it like so (e.g., under Linux or macOS):

Usage (Linux, macOS and similar systems)

make
./unit

A static library file is built as libSIMDCompressionAndIntersection.a which you can use in your
own projects along with our header files located in the include subdirectory.

You may also build and run our example:

make example
./example

To run tests, you can do

./testcodecs

(follow the instructions)

Usage (Windows users)

Windows users wishing to build using Visual Studio should go into a Developer Powershell, which is
accessible through the menus in the Visual Studio interface, and run the following from the
directory of the project:

nmake -f .\makefile.vc
 .\example.exe
 .\unit.exe

Under Windows, the static library is built as the file simdcomp_a.lib which you can use in your
own projects, along with our header files located in the include subdirectory.

For a simple C library

This library is a C++ research library. For something simpler,
written in C, see:

https://github.com/lemire/simdcomp

Comparison with the FastPFOR C++ library

The FastPFOR C++ Library available at https://github.com/lemire/FastPFor
implements some of the same compression schemes except that
it is not optimized for the compression of sorted lists of integers.

Other recommended libraries

Licensing

Apache License, Version 2.0

As far as the authors know, this work is patent-free.

Requirements

A CPU (AMD or Intel) with support for SSE2 (Pentium 4 or better) is required
while a CPU with SSE 4.1* (Penryn [2007] processors or better) is recommended.

A recent GCC (4.7 or better), Clang, Intel or Visual C++ compiler.

A processor support AVX (Intel or AMD).

Tested on Linux, MacOS and Windows. It should be portable to other platforms.

*- The default makefile might assume AVX support, but AVX is not required. For GCC
compilers, you might need the -msse2 flag, but you will not need the -mavx flag.

For advanced benchmarking, please see

advancedbenchmarking/README.md

where there is additional information as well as links to real data sets.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Kelly Sommers for useful feedback.

This work was supported by NSERC grant number 26143.