1High Speed Search of Large Text Bases on the Fujitsu Cellular Array Processor
David Hawking · 1991
The Australian National University has recently acquired an "experimental" 64 cell, distributed memory, cellular array processor (CAP) under a collaborative research agreement with Fujitsu Research Laboratories. Its considerable processing power and very large total amount of memory (2 gigabytes at the time of the conference) render feasible a brute--force parallel approach to free text retrieval. The brute--force approach offers great flexibility and, because it obviates the need for time--consuming index building, is well adapted to rapidly changing text bases. Very encouraging results have been achieved with a partial CAP emulation of an existing index--based serial program for dictionary research. A 550 megabyte dictionary was used as the example text base. Dramatic speed--ups have been achieved with a parallel implementation of conventional indexing techniques in which building the index is achieved in minutes rather than days. It is argued that practical systems built on CAP--lik...