Lempel-Ziv Parsing in External Memory

In the 35 years since its discovery, the Lempel-Ziv factorization (or LZ77 parsing) has become a fundamental method for data compression and string processing. In many applications, computation of the factorization is a time-space bottleneck. However, and despite the increasing need to apply LZ77 to massive data sets (for both storage and indexing), no algorithm to date scales to inputs that exceed the size of RAM. In this paper we describe the first algorithms for computing the LZ77 parsing efficiently using external memory.