"The objectives of STXXL project (distinguishing it from other libraries): • Make the library able to handle problems of real world size (up to dozens of terab

"The objectives of STXXL project (distinguishing it from other libraries): • Make the library able to handle problems of real world size (up to dozens of terabytes). • Offer transparent support of parallel disks. This feature although announced has not been implemented in any library. • Implement parallel disk algorithms. LEDA-SM and TPIE libraries offer only implementations of single disk EM algorithms. • Use computer resources more efficiently. STXXL allows transparent overlapping of I/O and computation in many algorithms and data structures. • Care about constant factors in I/O volume. A unique library feature “pipelining” can half the number of I/Os performed by an algorithm. • Care about the internal work, improve the in-memory algorithms. Having many disks can hide the latency and increase the I/O bandwidth, s.t. internal work becomes a bottleneck. • Care about operating system overheads. Use unbuffered disk access to avoid superfluous copying of data. • Shorten development times providing well known interface for EM algorithms and data structures. We provide STL-compatible2 interfaces for our implementations."