Index structures for distributed text databases

Abstract

The Web has became an obiquitous resource for distributed computing making it relevant to investigate new ways of providing efficient access to services available at dedicated sites. Efficiency is an ever-increasing demand which can be only satisfied with the development of parallel algorithms which are efficient in practice. This tutorial paper focuses on the design, analysis and implementation of parallel algorithms and data structures for widely-used text database applications on the Web. In particular we describe parallel algorithms for inverted files and suffix arrays structures that are suitable for implementing search engines. Algorithmic design is effected on top of the BSP model of parallel computing. This model ensures portability across diverse parallel architectures ranging from clusters to super-computers.