ABSTRACT
Input/Output communication (or simply I/O) between the fast internal memory and the slow external memory (EM, such as disk) can be a bottleneck when processing massive amounts of data, as is the case in many spatial and geometric applications [1]. Problems involving massive amounts of geometric data are ubiquitous in spatial databases, geographic information systems (GIS), constraint logic programming, object-oriented databases, statistics, virtual reality systems, and computer graphics. E-Business and space applications produce petabytes (1015 bytes) of data per year. A major challenge is to develop mechanisms for processing the data, or else much of the data will be useless.
