• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.8D no.4
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• pp.347-360
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• 2001

The most expensive spatial operation in spatial databases is a spatial join which computes a combined table of which tuple consists of two tuples of the two tables satisfying a spatial predicate. Although the execution time of sequential processing of a spatial join has been so far considerably improved, the response time is not tolerable because of not meeting the requirements of interactive users. It is usually appropriate to use parallel processing to improve the performance of spatial join processing. However, as the number of processors increases, the efficiency of each processor decreases rapidly because of the disk bottleneck and the overhead of message passing. This paper proposes the method of task allocation to soften the disk bottleneck caused by accessing the shared disk at the same time, and to minimize message passing among processors. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in terms of the number of disk accesses and message passing, we conduct experiments on the two kinds of parallel spatial join algorithms. The experimental tests on the MIMD parallel machine with shared disks show that the proposed semi-dynamic task allocation method outperforms the static and dynamic task allocation methods.