Parallel Information Retrieval on an SCI-Based PC-NOW

This paper presents an efficient parallel information retrieval (IR) system which provides fast information service for the Internet users on lowcost high-performance PC-NOW environment. The IR system is implemented on a PC cluster based on the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI), a powerful interconnecting mechanism for both shared memory models and message passing models. In the IR system, the inverted-index file (IIF) is partitioned into pieces using a greedy declustering algorithm and distributed to the cluster nodes to be stored on each node’s hard disk. For each incoming user’s query with multiple terms, terms are sent to the corresponding nodes which contain the relevant pieces of the IIF to be evaluated in parallel. According to the experiments, the IR system outperforms an MPI-based IR system using Fast Ethernet as an interconnect. Speed- up of up to 4.0 was obtained with an 8node cluster in processing each query on a 500,000-document IIF.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Sang-Hwa Chung, Hyuk-Chul Kwon, Kwang Ryel Ryu, Hankook Jang, Jin-Hyuk Kim, Cham-Ah Choi
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2000, Ir System, MPI-based IR, Powerful Interconnecting Mechanism