A search engine index for multimedia content

We present a distributed index data structure and algorithms devised to support parallel query processing of multimedia content in search engines. We present a comparative study with a number of data structures used as indexes for metric space databases. Our optimization criteria are based on requirements for high-performance search engines. The main advantages of our proposal are efficient performance with respect to other approaches (sequentially and in parallel), suitable treatment of secondary memory, and support for OpenMP multithreading. We presents experiments for the asynchronous (MPI) and bulk-synchronous (BSP) message passing models of parallel computing showing that in both models our approach outperforms others consistently.