Method for searching a database system including parallel processors

摘要

A method to operate on a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) computer for searching for relevant documents in a database which makes it possible to perform thousands of operations in parallel. The words of each document are stored by surrogate coding in tables in one or more of the processors of the SIMD computer. To determine which documents of the database contain a word that is the subject of a query, a query is broadcast from a central computer to all the processors and the query operations are simultaneously performed on the documents stored in each processor. The results of the query are then returned to the central computer. After all the search words have been broadcast to the processors and point values accumulated as appropriate, the point values associated with each document are reported to the central computer. The documents with the largest point values are then ascertained and their identification is provided to the user.