CMSC 423 Project 2 : Overview

This assignment deals with the construction and querying of the suffix array. In order to make the construction of the suffix array generally useful, it will be necessary to not only build this index, but also to be able to save it to disk and load it from disk. To this end, this project will also require you to be able to serialize and deserialize your index. Your project will consist of 3 executables buildsa, inspectsa, and querysa which are described in more detail below. Though you will implement 3 programs, you can think of the project as being broken into two parts.

In the first part of the project, you will implement a program to read a reference sequence from a FASTA file, to construct the suffix array on this sequence, and then to write the string and suffix array to file in a binary format. You will also implement a program to read the saved file from disk, compute some statistics about the suffix array, and write those to a text format output file.

In the second part of the project, you will implement a program to read your serialized suffix array from file, as well as to read an input FASTA file containing many queries. Your program will then produce an output file with the query results in a well-specified output format.

Note: As was mentioned at the start of the class, the projects will generally build off of each other. Project 1 was a bit of an outlier in this regard. The only capability from project 1 that you will need is the ability to read FASTA files, and the ability to make executables using a build.sh script. However, more overlap will be present between project 2 and future projects, so you should attempt to build as clean and useable of an interface for your code in this project as you can — you will likely be using the suffix array as a library in future projects.

Overall structure

You will submit your assignment as a tarball named CMSC423_F21_A2.tar.gz. When this tarball is expanded, it should create a single folder named CMSC423_F21_A2. This folder must be created in the directory where the decompression (i.e. tar xzvf) is done, and must not be nested inside any other folders. The details of how you structure your “source tree” are up to you, but the following must hold (to enable proper automated testing of your programs).

  • There should be a script at the top-level of CMSC423_F21_A2 called build.sh. This should do whatever is necessary to create 3 executables at the top level (one called buildsa and one called inspectsa and one called querysa). If you’re comfortable with Makefiles, this can just call make, or it could simply run the commands necessary to compile your programs and copy them to the top-level directory. You can assume this script is run in a bash shell.

  • There should be a README.md file in the top level directory. This README file should contain the following information.

    • What language have you written your solution in?
    • What did you find to be the hardest part of this assignment?
    • What resources did you consult in working on this assignment (view this as a form of citation; you shouldn’t copy code directly from anywhere in your assignment, but if you consulted other sources please list them here).

Turnin : The assignment turnin will be handled using Gradescope. We intend to have the infrastructure for this set up by the end of this week, so please check back here for detailed instructions on the submission procedure.

Part (a), constructing and inspecting the suffix array

In this part of the assignment, you will write two programs. The first program will be called buildsa; it will read in a “genome” (in FASTA) format, build the suffix array on this reference, and write the string and suffix array to a binary file. The second program will be called inspectsa; it will read in the binary file written by buildsa, and then it will compute some statistics (details below) about the suffix array and write out a test file containing these statistics and the suffix array.

buildsa

buildsa: Input

The input consists of 2 arguments, given in this order:

  • reference - the path to a FASTA format file containing the reference of which you will build the suffix array.
  • output - the program will write a single binary output file to a file with this name, that contains a serialized version of the input string and the suffix array.

buildsa: Output

Your program will output a file with the name given by the output argument above. This must be a binary file holding everything necessary to perform query using your suffix array. Specifically, it should include the input string itself (probably with the sentinel $ appended) and it should also include an encoding of the entries of the suffix array. Note: The specific binary encoding is up to you — it can be as simple as an integer representing the string length followed by the bytes of the string and an integer representing the number of bytes in the suffix array followed by the entries, or something more complex. You are allowed to use an external serialization library for this component, but the serialization must be to a binary (not text) format. In C++ you could use something like cereal or bitsery; in Rust you could use soemthing like rkyv or serde with bincode. For reasons mentioned previously (and for the sake of not running into performance issues in future projects), I’d not recommend using Python for this project, but if you do, you can just use the builtin pickle and cpickle modules.

NOTE : The timeout for all tests for the gradescope server will be 30 minutes. This will remain the case in future projects as the amount of processing you have to do generally increases. Thus, we highly recommend that you implement either the O(m lg m) suffix array construction algorithm from the original suffix array paper, the O(m) DC3 algorithm we covered in class, or another efficient (i.e. not O(\(m^2\) lg m)) algorithm.

inspectsa

inspectsa: Input

The input consists of 3 arguments, given in this order:

  • index - the path to the binary file containing your serialized suffix array (as written by buildsa above).
  • sample_rate - the rate at which suffix array entries will be sampled in your output (see below).
  • output - the program will write text output to this file containing some basic statistics about the suffix array, as well as a text representation of the suffix array.

inspectsa: Output

Your program will output a file with the name given by the output argument above. The output will consist of text file with exactly 4 lines. Unlike project 1, there are no keys and values; rather, the values must be written out in precisely the order specified here. Your output should contain:

  • mean LCP1 value : This is a floating point number representing the average length of the longest common prefix shared between subsequent entries of the suffix array.

  • median LCP1 value : This is a floating point number representing the median length of the longest common prefix shared between subsequent entries of the suffix array.

  • maximum LCP1 value : This is an integer number representing the maximum length of the longest common prefix shared between subsequent entries of the suffix array.

  • suffix array spot check : This is a textual representation of certain values within the suffix array. Specifically, this line should encode a list of tab-separated integers that consists of the following entries of the suffix array (i.e. the entries in the suffix array appearing at the following indices) [sample_rate0, sample_rate1, sample_rate2, …, sample_ratefloor(Suffix Array Length / sample_rate)].

Part (b), querying the suffix array

In the second part of the assignment, you will implement

Your program for this part should be called querysa. This program will take as input 4 arguments, your serialized suffix array, a FASTA file containing queries, a query mode parameter, and an output file name. It will perform query in the SA and report the results in the output file specified in the format specified below.

querysa: Input

  • index - the path to the binary file containing your serialized suffix array (as written by buildsa above).
  • queries - the path to an input file in FASTA format containing a set of records. Unlike project 1 you will need to care about both the name and sequence of these fasta records, as you will report the output using the name that appears for a record. Note, query sequences can span more than one line (headers will always be on one line).
  • query mode - this argument should be one of two strings; either naive or simpaccel. If the string is naive you should perform your queries using the naive binary search algorithm. If the string is simpaccel you should perform your queries using the “simple accelerant” algorithm we covered in class.
  • output - the name to use for the resulting output.

querysa: Output

  • output - the output file of your program. This file should contain the results of your queries in the following format. Each line should contain a tab-separated list containing the following information:

    • query_name, k, hit_1, hit_2, hit_k

Here, the query_name is simply the header of the corresponding FASTA entry (the string after the > — not including the > on the header line). The value k is the number of occurrences of the query string in the underlying text on which the suffix array is built. Finally hit_1 through hit_k are the positions in the original text (0-indexed) where the query string occurs. If a query string does not occur in the text, then you should report k = 0, and there will be no hit_1, … etc. entries for that query.