Massive Parallelism on the Hybrid Text-Retrieval Machine

The design of a high-performance, cost-eeective, machine for retrieving textual data is discussed in this paper. High performance and cost eeectiveness are achieved by a combination of low-cost hard disks, software ltering techniques, and a large amount of main memory. The discussion focuses on the signature processor, which is based on the partitioned signature le technique, and the mass storage system, which is based on a disk array. A performance evaluation on the individual system components, namely, the signature processor and the mass storage system, as well as the entire system is presented.