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We describe data structures for representing simplicial meshes compactly while supporting online queries and updates efficiently. Our data structure requires about a factor of five less memory than the most efficient standard data structures for triangular or tetrahedral meshes, while efficiently supporting traversal among simplices, storing data on simplices, and insertion and deletion of simplices. Our implementation of the data structures uses about 5 bytes/triangle in two dimensions (2D) and 7.5 bytes/tetrahedron in three dimensions (3D). We use the data structures to implement 2D and 3D incremental algorithms for generating a Delaunay mesh. The 3D algorithm can generate 100 Million tetrahedra with 1 Gbyte of memory, including the space for the coordinates and all data used by the algorithm. The runtime of the algorithm is as fast as Shewchuk's Pyramid code, the most efficient we know of, and uses a factor of 3.5 less memory overall.

We describe an implementation of a compact parallel algorithm for 3D Delaunay tetrahedralization on a 64-processor shared-memory machine. Our algorithm uses a concurrent version of the Bowyer-Watson incremental insertion, and a thread-safe space-efficient structure for representing the mesh. Using the implementation we are able to generate significantly larger Delaunay meshes than have previously been generated-10 billion tetrahedra on a 64 processor SMP using 200GB of RAM.The implementation makes use of a locality based relabeling of the vertices that serves three purposes-it is used as part of the space efficient representation, it improves the memory locality, and it reduces the overhead necessary for locks. The implementation also makes use of a caching technique to avoid excessive decoding of vertex information, a technique for backing out of insertions that collide, and a shared work queue for maintaining points that have yet to be inserted.

We consider the problem of maintaining a dynamic dictionary T of keys and associated data for which both the keys and data are bit strings that can vary in length from zero up to the length w of a machine word. We present a data structure for this variable-bit-length dictionary problem that supports constant time lookup and expected amortized constant time insertion and deletion. It uses O(m + 3n − n log 2 n) bits, where n is the number of elements in T , and m is the total number of bits across all strings in T (keys and data). Our dictionary uses an array A[1 . . . n] in which locations store variable-bit-length strings. We present a data structure for this variable-bit-length array problem that supports worst-case constant-time lookups and updates and uses O(m + n) bits, where m is the total number of bits across all strings stored in A.The motivation for these structures is to support applications for which it is helpful to efficiently store short varying length bit strings. We present several applications, including representations for semi-dynamic graphs, order queries on integers sets, cardinal trees with varying cardinality, and simplicial meshes of d dimensions. These results either generalize or simplify previous results.