The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) database team has developed an innovative “overlapping partitioning” method for storing enormous amounts of information for rapid access. By overlapping equally sized packets of information in the partitioned sphere, searching for nearest neighbor sources becomes quick and efficient. Further, the technique has been shown to work just as efficiently with increasingly complex systems. The improved algorithms resulting from this innovative architecture will be available as open source software that can be used by a broad spectrum of fields to transform access to large databases.
