PARALLEL SUFFIX-PREFIX-MATCHING ALGORITHM AND APPLICATIONS

Our main result in this paper is a parallel algorithm for suffix-prefi x- (s-p-) matching that has optimal speedup on a concurrent-read/concu rrent-write parallel random-access machine (CRCW PRAM). Given a string of length m, the algorithm runs in time O(log m) using m/log m proces sors. This algorithm is important because we utilize s-p matching as a fundamental building block to solve several pattern- and string-match ing problems, such as the following: 1. string matching; 2. multitext/ multipattern string matching; 3. multidimensional pattern matching; 4. pattern-occurrence detection; 5. on-line string matching. In particul ar, our techniques and algorithms are the first to preserve optimal sp eedup in the context of pattern matching in higher dimensions and are the only known ones to do so for dimensions d > 2.