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The World Wide Web presents an interesting opportunity for data mining and knowledge discovery, and this area is growing rapidly as both a research topic and a business activity. In this survey we describe some of the problems that are addressed, and elements of the WebFountain infrastructure that we have built for addressing them. Our focus here is on describing some of the lessons learned and some broad research areas that are involved.

The content of the World-Wide Web is pervaded by information of a geographical or spatial nature, particularly location information such as addresses, postal codes, and telephone numbers. We present a system for extracting spatial knowledge from collections of Web pages gathered by Web-crawling programs. For each page determined to contain location information, we apply geocoding techniques to compute geographic coordinates, such as latitude-longitude pairs. Next, we augment the location information with keyword descriptors extracted from Web page contents. We then apply spatial data mining techniques on the augmented location information to derive spatial knowledge.

SUNMOS is an acronym for Sandia/UNM Operating System. It was originally developed for the nCUBE-2 MIMD supercomputer between January and December of 1991. Between April and August of 1993, SUNMOS was ported to the Intel Paragon. This document provides a quick overview of how to compile and run jobs using the SUNMOS environment on the Paragon. The primary goal of SUNMOS is to provide high performance message passing and process support an example of its capabilities, SUNMOS Release 1.4 occupies approximately 240K of memory on a Paragon node, and is able to send messages at bandwidths of 165 megabytes per second with latencies as low as 42 microseconds using Intel NX calls. By contrast, Release 1.2 of OSF/1 for the Paragon occupies approximately 7 megabytes of memory on a node, has a peak bandwidth of 65 megabytes per second, and latencies as low as 42 microseconds (the communication numbers are reported elsewhere in these proceedings).

In this note the authors describe the results of some tests of the message-passing performance of the Intel Paragon. These tests have been carried out under both the Intel-supplied OSF/1 operating system with an NX library, and also under an operating system called SUNMOS (Sandia UNM Operating System). For comparison with the previous generation of Intel machines, they have also included the results on the Intel Touchstone Delta. The source code used for these tests is identical for all systems. As a result of these tests, the authors can conclude that SUNMOS demonstrates that the Intel Paragon hardware is capable of very high bandwidth communication, and that the message coprocessor on Paragon nodes can be used to give quite respectable latencies. Further tuning can be expected to yield even better performance.