INVERTED FILE PARTITIONING SCHEMES IN MULTIPLE DISK SYSTEMS

Multiple-disk I/O systems (disk arrays) have been an attractive approa ch to meet high performance I/O demands in data intensive applications such as information retrieval systems. When we partition and distribu te files across multiple disks to exploit the potential for I/O parall elism, a balanced I/O workload distribution becomes important for good performance. Naturally, the performance of a parallel information ret rieval system using an inverted file structure is affected by the part itioning scheme of the inverted file. In this paper, we propose two di fferent partitioning schemes for an inverted file system for a shared- everything multiprocessor machine with multiple disks. We study the pe rformance of these schemes by simulation under a number of workloads w here the term frequencies in the documents are varied, the term freque ncies in the queries are varied, the number of disks are varied and th e multiprogramming level is varied.