| Performance engineering case study: Heap construction | |
| Authors: | Jesper Bojesen, Jyrki Katajainen, and Maz Spork |
| Publication: | Report 99/12, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen (1999), 44 app.pp. |
| Full text: |  PS (754 kB) |
| Abstract: | The behaviour of three methods for constructing a binary heap is studied. The methods considered are the original one proposed by Williams [1964], in which elements are repeatedly inserted into a single heap; the improvement by Floyd [1964], in which small heaps are repeatedly merged to bigger heaps; and a recent method proposed, e. g., by Fadel et al. [1999] in which a heap is built layerwise. Both the worst-case number of instructions and that of cache misses are analysed. It is well-known that Floyd’s method has the best instruction count. Let N denote the size of the heap to be constructed, B the number of elements that fit into a cache line, and let c and d be some positive constants. Our analysis shows that, under reasonable assumptions, repeated insertion and layerwise construction both incur at most c N/B cache misses, whereas repeated merging, as programmed by Floyd, can incur more than (d N log2 B)/B cache misses. However, for our memory-tuned versions of repeated insertion and repeated merging the number of cache misses incurred is close to the optimal bound N/B. |
| Related: |  HTML (Conference version) HTML (Journal version) |
| BibLATEX: | @report{BKS1999bR,
author = {Jesper Bojesen and Jyrki Katajainen and Maz Spork},
title = {Performance engineering case study: {H}eap construction},
type = {Report},
number = {99/12},
institution = {Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen},
year = {1999},
pagetotal = {44},
}
|