Towards Progressive and Load Balancing Distributed Computation: A Case Study on Skyline Analysis

Many latest high performance distributed computational environments come with high bandwidth in communication. Such high bandwidth distributed systems provide unprecedented opportunities for analyzing huge datasets, but simultaneously posts new technical challenges. For users, progressive query answering is important. For utility of systems, load balancing is critical. How we can achieve progressive and load balancing distributed computation is an interesting and promising research direction. As skyline analysis has been shown very useful in many multi-criteria decision making applications, in this paper, we study the problem of progressive and load balancing distributed skyline analysis. We propose a simple yet scalable approach which comes with several nice properties for progressive and load balancing query answering. We conduct extensive experiments which demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.