Title :
Parallelizing a GIS on a shared address space architecture
Author :
Shekhar, Shashi ; Ravada, Sivakumar ; Kumar, Vipin ; Chubb, Douglas ; Turner, Greg
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Minnesota Univ., Minneapolis, MN, USA
fDate :
12/1/1996 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
We are developing a high-performance GIS (our term for a parallel GIS) on an SGI Challenge, a 16-processor machine with a shared address space architecture (SASA). We describe how we parallelized a key GIS operation using a message-passing algorithm. We advocate the linking of two diverse approaches to the design of parallel architectures and algorithms. As part of our project, we evaluated the effect of parallelizing an important GIS operation: range query. We parallelized a range query using data partitioning (to reduce synchronization) and dynamic load balancing (to improve speedup). We found that these approaches do achieve the performance required for many GIS applications
Keywords :
geographic information systems; message passing; parallel algorithms; parallel architectures; query processing; resource allocation; shared memory systems; software performance evaluation; visual databases; GIS; SGI Challenge; data partitioning; dynamic load balancing; geographical information system; high-performance system; message-passing algorithm; parallel algorithms; parallel architectures; range query; shared address space architecture; speedup; synchronization; Aerospace simulation; Application software; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Data visualization; Delay; Engines; Geographic Information Systems; Graphics; Three dimensional displays;
