Worst-Case Efficient External-Memory Priority Queues
Gerth Stølting Brodal, Gerth St��lting Brodal, Im Stadtwald, Jyrki Katajainen · 1997
. A priority queue Q is a data structure that maintains a collection of elements, each element having an associated priority drawn from a totally ordered universe, under the operations Insert, which inserts an element into Q, and DeleteMin, which deletes an element with the minimum priority from Q. In this paper a priority-queue implementation is given which is efficient with respect to the number of block transfers or I/Os performed between the internal and external memories of a computer. Let B and M denote the respective capacity of a block and the internal memory measured in elements. The developed data structure handles any intermixed sequence of Insert and DeleteMin operations such that in every disjoint interval of B consecutive priorityqueue operations at most c log M=B N M I/Os are performed, for some positive constant c. These I/Os are divided evenly among the operations: if B c log M=B N M , one I/O is necessary for every B=(c log M=B N M )th operation ...