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Record W4413980865 · doi:10.14778/3749646.3749703

Sphinx: A Succinct Perfect Hash Index for x86

2025· article· en· W4413980865 on OpenAlex
Sajad Faghfoor Maghrebi, Niv Dayan

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the VLDB Endowment · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicAdvanced Data Storage Technologies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHash functionSphinxIndex (typography)Computer sciencex86Computer securityHistoryWorld Wide WebProgramming languageArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Many modern key-value stores rely on an in-memory index to map the location of each data entry in storage. The size of this index often becomes a memory bottleneck that makes it difficult to scale the system to large data sizes. To address this problem, the state-of-the-art approach is to structure this index as a succinct perfect hash table using only ≈ 4 bits per key. The downside is that the hash table encoding is computationally expensive to parse and may harm overall system performance. We introduce Sphinx, a succinct perfect hash table reengineered for high performance on commodity CPUs. Sphinx is encoded in a manner that lends itself to efficient access using rank and select primitives, and it uses auxiliary metadata to decode common hash table slots instantaneously. Sphinx is also expandable and parallelizable. We compare Sphinx to the best alternatives and show that it leads to a 2x reduction in query latency, update latency, and memory footprint.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.828
Threshold uncertainty score0.469

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.249
Teacher spread0.239 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it