Infrastructure for building parallel database systems for multi-dimensional data

Our study of a large set of scientific applications over the past three years indicates that the processing for multidimensional datasets is often highly stylized. The basic processing step usually consists of mapping the individual input items to the output grid and computing output items by aggregating, in some way, all the input items mapped to the corresponding grid point. In this paper we discuss the design and performance of T2, an infrastructure for building parallel database systems that integrates storage, retrieval and processing of multi-dimensional datasets. It achieves its primary advantage from the ability to integrate data retrieval and processing for a wide variety of applications and from the ability to maintain and jointly process multiple datasets with different underlying grids. We present preliminary performance results comparing the implementation of two applications using the T2 services with custom-built integrated implementations.