NSF Award
9985019
Recent developments in hardware have fueled the growth of applications that store and manipulate very large volumes of data. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of physical motion, I/O devices have not made commensurate advances, resulting in a performance bottleneck. The goal of this project is to develop a broad class of innovative techniques to alleviate the I/O bottleneck for modern database applications. The project focuses on data-intensive applications that handle multi-dimensional and multimedia data. The research has two major directions. The first is the development of declustering schemes for the efficient execution of range and nearest-neighbor queries over large multi-dimensional datasets under realistic assumptions such as non-constant disk I/O times, and non-uniform data and query distributions. The second addresses the storage and content-based retrieval of multimedia documents that can be viewed at various levels of quality (e.g., resolution). The goal of this research is to provide integrated techniques for placement, scheduling, migration, and reliability of continuous media data on secondary and tertiary storage. The approach is to design, develop, implement, and test the schemes on real datasets such as sanitized medical records. In this manner the effects of the simplifying assumptions typically made to make analysis tractable can be identified and addressed. The project will result in a collection of new techniques as well a prototype implementation and test results on real applications. These will be made available for public access over the world-wide-web. The expected impact is a 10-50% improvement in performance for a broad class of applications. The education component aims to integrate I/O related issues for modern systems into the graduate curriculum. This involves the development of new web-based tools and projects that will enable students to understand and experiment with I/O issues and solutions, and facilitate distance learning.<br/>http://www.cs.purdue.edu/~sunil/
