Sorted lists of integers are commonly used in inverted indexes and database systems. They are often compressed in memory. We can use the SIMD instructions available in common processors to boost the speed of integer compression schemes. Our S4-BP128-D4 scheme uses as little as 0.7 CPU cycles per decoded integer while still providing state-of-the-art compression. However, if the subsequent processing of the integers is slow, the effort spent on optimizing decoding speed can be wasted. To show that it does not have to be so, we (1) vectorize and optimize the intersection of posting lists; (2) introduce the SIMD Galloping algorithm. We exploit the fact that one SIMD instruction can compare 4 pairs of integers at once. We experiment with two TREC text collections, GOV2 and ClueWeb09 (Category B), using logs from the TREC million-query track. We show that using only the SIMD instructions ubiquitous in all modern CPUs, our techniques for conjunctive queries can double the speed of a state-of-the-art approach.
In many important applications-such as search engines and relational database systems-data are stored in the form of arrays of integers. Encoding and, most importantly, decoding of these arrays consumes considerable CPUtime. Therefore, substantial effort has been made to reduce costs associated with compression and decompression. In particular, researchers have exploited the superscalar nature of modern processors and single-instruction, multiple-data SIMD instructions. Nevertheless, we introduce a novel vectorized scheme called SIMD-BP128i¾? that improves over previously proposed vectorized approaches. It is nearly twice as fast as the previously fastest schemes on desktop processors varint-G8IU and PFOR. At the same time, SIMD-BP128i¾? saves up to 2bits int. For even better compression, we propose another new vectorized scheme SIMD-FastPFOR that has a compression ratio within 10 of a state-of-the-art scheme Simple-8b while being two times faster during decoding. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Powerful SIMD instructions in modern processors offer an opportunity for greater search performance. In this paper, we apply these instructions to decoding search engine posting lists. We start by exploring variable-length integer encoding formats used to represent postings. We define two properties, byte-oriented and byte-preserving, that characterize many formats of interest. Based on their common structure, we define a taxonomy that classifies encodings along three dimensions, representing the way in which data bits are stored and additional bits are used to describe the data. Using this taxonomy, we discover new encoding formats, some of which are particularly amenable to SIMD-based decoding. We present generic SIMD algorithms for decoding these formats. We also extend these algorithms to the most common traditional encoding format. Our experiments demonstrate that SIMD-based decoding algorithms are up to 3 times faster than non-SIMD algorithms.