Evaluating the Performance of Distributed Architectures for Information Retrieval using a Variety of Workloads

ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. 2 \Delta B. Cahoon and K.S. McKinley 1. INTRODUCTION The increasing number of large, unstructured text collections require full-text information retrieval (IR) systems in order for users to access them effectively. Current systems typically only allow users to connect to a single database either locally or perhaps on another machine. A distributed IR system should be able to provide multiple users with concurrent, efficient access to multiple text collections located on disparate sites. Since the documents in unstructured text collections are independent, IR systems are ideal applications to distribute across a network of worksta..