An evaluation of document retrieval from serial files using the ICL Distributed Array Processor

The ICL Distributed Array Processor, or DAP, is a single instruction stream, multiple data stream computer in which instructions are broadcast for simultaneous execution in each of 4096 processing elements. Although originally developed for numeric computation, the DAP also provides a means for the rapid matching of the term lists representing documents and queries in information retrieval systems, and this paper presents an investigation of the use of the DAP for the parallel searching of large serial files of documents. Best match retrieval experiments with three collections of documents and queries show that the DAP is very much more efficient than a conventional mainframe computer in calculating a measure of similarity between a query and each of the documents in a large collection. It is suggested that the DAP, or machines with similar architectures, could form the basis for interactive bibliographic searching of serial files.