Geographical Information System Application of Multiprocessor Multidisk Image Servers

This contribution analyses the behavior of two kinds of multiprocessor multidisk storage server architectures for a data-intensive application, namely for spatial queries in geographical information systems (GIS). The two kinds of servers are:: (1) a workstation cluster architecture with multiple processors, multiple disks, and a shared-bus shared-memory architecture ; (2) a distributed-memory architecture, similar to the T9000 transputer-based architectures, where processing nodes and disk nodes are connected by a high-throughput crossbar switch. The GIS application under investigation is the map overlay with map at different scales and resolutions.