An Efficient Multidimensional Index Structure for Parallel Environments

Generally, multidimensional data such as image and spatial data require large amount of storage space. There is a limit to store and manage those large amounts of data in single workstation. If we manage the data on parallel computing environment which is being actively researched these days, we can get highly improved performance. In this paper, we propose a parallel multidimensional index structure that exploits the parallelism of the parallel computing environment. The proposed index structure is nP(processor)-nxmD(disk) architecture which is the hybrid type of nP-nD and 1P-nD. Its node structure in-creases fan-out and reduces the height of an index. Also, a range search algorithm that maximizes I/O parallelism is devised, and it is applied to k-nearest neighbor queries. Through various experiments, it is shown that the proposed method outperforms other parallel index structures.