The PC cluster architecture is considered as a cost-effective alternative to the existing supercomputers for realizing a high-performance information retrieval (IR) system. To implement an efficient IR system on a PC cluster, it is essential to achiev...
The PC cluster architecture is considered as a cost-effective alternative to the existing supercomputers for realizing a high-performance information retrieval (IR) system. To implement an efficient IR system on a PC cluster, it is essential to achieve maximum parallelism by having the data appropriately distributed to the local hard disks of the PCs in such a way that the disk I/O and the subsequent computation are distributed as evenly as possible to all the PCs. If the terms in the inverted index file can be classified to closely related clusters, the parallelism can be maximized by distributing them to the PCs in an interleaved manner. One of the goals of this research is the development of methods for automatically clustering the terms based on the likelihood of the terms' co-occurrence in the same query. Also, in this paper, we propose a method for duplicate distribution of inverted index records among the PCs to achieve fault-tolerance as well as dynamic load balancing. Experiments with a large corpus revealed the efficiency and effectiveness of our method.