Performance problems associated with accessing data that is distributed among various sites, computers, and relational database management systems are not amenable to purely software solutions. The relative performance of commercial databases on a variety of queries and hardware systems, the relative size and location of tables, and network bandwidth and loading are issues that must be addressed in order to balance loads and produce reasonable response times. These factors also increase the complexity of associated software. Even if all of these parameters can be taken into account, current database technologies do not provide the performance needed for such very large databases as those maintained by NASA sites. The company has developed the Hyper-Index Parallel Database Accelerator to accelerate query processing on single relational databases by up to three orders-of-magnitude, using the massive degree of parallelism of the MasPar MP-1 supercomputer and other proprietary storage structures and algorithms. The hyper-index is potentially a very powerful network management tool for distributed databases because it can, for many queries, use a limited amount of centralized data and indexes to produce fast results while reducing network traffic.
Potential Commercial Applications:A network-based, distributed database management system, one that delivers the query performance and the reduced network load offered by the hyper- index approach, is a product for which government and business will find many applications.
