The prototype differs from the proposed architecture only in that it randomly generates the keynet repository as well as queries sent to it. The prototype runs on a network of up to 8 sparcstations connected by a twisted-pair network. The network is not dedicated to our research project. The prototype is fully distributed, using a pure message-passing communication mechanism. The individual nodes are implemented as servers.
Threads explicitly yield control and are never preempted, but they can be interrupted.
Each server is responsible for a fixed amount of memory, chosen to be small enough for page faulting to be unusual. The indexing uses a hash algorithm using direct addressing with secondary hashing in the event of a collision. Each document keynet was generated randomly and had 200 index terms. This corresponds roughly to an document abstract that is around 100 to 150 words long, or equivalently, to a content label with 200 attributes. Queries had 10 terms each.