A Performance Evaluation of Parallel Information Retrieval on Symmetrical Multiprocessors

Providing timely access to text collections both locally and across the Internet is instrumental in making information retrieval (IR) truly useful. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit a symmetrical multiprocessor architecture to build high performance IR servers. We start by implementing a multithreaded IR server and a multitasking IR server to investigate that how best to execute multiple IR commands in parallel. We use InQuery, an inference network, full-text IR retrieval engine, to provide the basic IR services [5, 6, 20]. To expedite our investigation of possible system configurations, characteristics of IR collections, and the basic IR system performance, we implement a simulator with numerous system parameters, such as the number of CPUs, threads, disks, collection size, and query characteristics. We then validate the simulator against our implementation. By using multiple threads, CPUs, and disks, we demonstrate scalable performance for a variety of system configuration..