  The greedy spanner is a high-quality spanner: its total weight, edge count
and maximal degree are asymptotically optimal and in practice significantly
better than for any other spanner with reasonable construction time.
Unfortunately, all known algorithms that compute the greedy spanner of n points
use Omega(n^2) space, which is impractical on large instances. To the best of
our knowledge, the largest instance for which the greedy spanner was computed
so far has about 13,000 vertices.
  We present a O(n)-space algorithm that computes the same spanner for points
in R^d running in O(n^2 log^2 n) time for any fixed stretch factor and
dimension. We discuss and evaluate a number of optimizations to its running
time, which allowed us to compute the greedy spanner on a graph with a million
vertices. To our knowledge, this is also the first algorithm for the greedy
spanner with a near-quadratic running time guarantee that has actually been
implemented.
