A standard database can only store and retrieve individual hydrodynamic snapshots. A more efficient approach would let the database average the snapshots and perform other basic processing. Colors denote the distribution across four processors of the domain elements, devised to minimize the costs of communications among processors. The assumption is that the processing will be too application-specific to warrant common support. The ADR project, led by Saltz, integrates data retrieval with processing, because many scientific applications have similar processing requirements, at least for formatting data returned from a database.
Integrated processing has three main advantages.
Second, by overlapping processing and retrieval, ADR can mask query latencies and improve efficiency. Without parallelism, operations can take up to twice as long. Finally, ADR minimizes the amount of data transmitted from server to client because the processed data is often much smaller than the amount of data accessed. The ADR can be customized for various applications, while the system provides a uniform interface to the data and processing. An application developer need only provide a data description and the processing methods.