FIG. 1.

Ragged arrays compactly store non-uniform length data in memory. (a) A schematic comparison between the memory footprint of a masked, uniform array and our implementation of the ragged array interface. In the masked array, rows of length lower than the longest row are padded with additional, null-valued elements to preserve the uniformity of the array. In the ragged array, however, rows are stored concatenated and memory is not expended. (b) A plot of memory used by traditional and ragged arrays as a function of aggregate simulation time as trajectories of increasing length are added from a previously published Folding@home dataset.¹¹