We study deterministic top-k retrieval under Longest Common Prefix (LCP) similarity for N sequences of length L. We prove a tight Omega(N) space lower bound (cell-probe model) and present a trie-based index using O(N*L) space with O(L+k) query time. We contrast this with pairwise materialization (Theta(N^2)), which hits a practical OOM wall at scale, while our indexed approach remains O(N) in memory. We then introduce Thermal-Aware Logic (TAL), which turns prefix structure into range-bounded scans. In hardware measurements, TAL reduces energy per query by 308x (0.0145 J vs 4.46 J) and cuts p95 latency by 329x (0.114 ms vs 37.5 ms) on a 20M-item range-scan benchmark, while sustaining near-peak utilization (~99%) under long runs. The result is a deterministic retrieval primitive with receipts in regimes where approximate methods are unacceptable.
@article{arxiv.2602.04936,
title = {Deterministic Retrieval at Scale: Optimal-Space LCP Indexing and 308x Energy Reduction on Modern GPUs},
author = {Stanislav Byriukov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04936},
year = {2026}
}