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

Volume

29

Issue

12

fYear

1996

fDate

12/1/1996 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

42

Lastpage

48

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;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computer

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9162

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/2.546608

Filename

546608