BIORTHOGONALLY ACCESSED 3-DIMENSIONAL 2-PHOTON MEMORY FOR RELATIONAL-DATABASE OPERATIONS

Memory bandwidth is a bottleneck for very large database machines. Par allel-access three-dimensional two-photon memories have the potential of achieving enormous throughput (>100 Gbit/s) and capacity (1 Tbit/cm (3)) [Appl. Opt. 29, 2058 (1990)] and, consequently, are well suited f or this application. Our analysis shows that some operations can be co mpleted more than 2 orders of magnitude faster with this type of memor y than with a system based on serial-access storage. These particular memories have a further feature of being accessible in orthogonal dire ctions. We show that this property, used in conjunction with a three-d imensional data-organization scheme designed for this approach, leads to improved performance by permitting the user a choice of accessing s trategies for a given operation. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.