T2: A Customizable Parallel Database For Multi-dimensional Data

Chialin Chang Anurag Acharya Alan Sussman Joel Saltz

SIGMOD Record, March 1998

Abstract:

In this paper, we present {\em T2}, a customizable parallel database that integrates storage, retrieval and processing of multi-dimensional datasets. T2 provides support for common operations including index generation, data retrieval, memory management, scheduling of processing across a parallel machine and user interaction. It achieves its primary advantage from the ability to seamlessly integrate data retrieval and processing for a wide variety of applications and from the ability to maintain and jointly process multiple datasets with different underlying grids. Most other systems for multi-dimensional data have focused on uniformly distributed datasets, such as images, maps, and dense multi-dimensional arrays. Many real datasets, however, are non-uniform or unstructured. For example, satellite data consists of a two dimensional strip that is embedded in a three dimensional space; water contamination studies use unstructured meshes to selectively simulate regions and so on. T2 can handle both uniform and non-uniform datasets.

Postscript (compressed 87K) Soon to be available as UCSB TRCS98-05.