Multi-resolution bitmap indexes for scientific data

The unique characteristics of scientific data and queries cause traditional indexing techniques to perform poorly on scientific workloads, occupy excessive space, or both. Refinements of bitmap indexes have been proposed previously as a solution to this problem. In this article, we describe the difficulties we encountered in deploying bitmap indexes with scientific data and queries from two real-world domains. In particular, previously proposed methods of binning, encoding, and compressing bitmap vectors either were quite slow for processing the large-range query conditions our scientists used, or required excessive storage space. Nor could the indexes easily be built or used on parallel platforms. In this article, we show how to solve these problems through the use of multi-resolution, parallelizable bitmap indexes, which support a fine-grained trade-off between storage requirements and query performance. Our experiments with large data sets from two scientific domains show that multi-resolution, parallelizable bitmap indexes occupy an acceptable amount of storage while improving range query performance by roughly a factor of 10, compared to a single-resolution bitmap index of reasonable size.