Optimizing the query performance of block index through data analysis and I/O modeling

Indexing technique has become an efficient tool to enable scientists to directly access the most relevant data records. But, the time and space requirements of building and storing indexes are expensive in the traditional approaches, such as R-tree and bitmaps. Recently, we started to address this issue by using the idea of "block index", and our previous work has shown promising results from comparing it against other well-known solutions, including ADIOS, SciDB, and FastBit. In this work, we further improve the technique from both theoretical and implementation perspectives. Driven by an extensive effort in characterizing scientific datasets and modeling I/O systems, we presented a theoretical model to analyze its query performance with respect to a given block size configuration. We also introduced three optimization techniques to achieve a 2.3x query time reduction comparing to the original implementation.