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Storing spatial data on a network of workstations

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Abstract

It is becoming increasingly important that a Geographical Information System delivers high performance to efficiently store, retrieve and process the voluminous data that it needs to handle. It is necessary to employ processing and storage parallelism for scalable long‐term solutions. With the demise of many custom‐built parallel machines, it is imperative that we use off‐the‐shelf technology to provide this parallelism. A closely‐coupled network of workstations is a viable alternative. This paper shows that a distributed index structure spanning the workstations can provide an efficient shared storage structure that can be used to get to the geographic information distributed amongst the individual disks and memories of the workstations. This goal can be attained without significantly compromising on the time taken to build this structure.

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An, N., Lu, R., Qian, L. et al. Storing spatial data on a network of workstations. Cluster Computing 2, 259–270 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019047229571

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