@InProceedings{bell:physics,
  author = {Jean L. Bell},
  title = {A Specialized Data Management System for Parallel Execution of
  Particle Physics Codes},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
  Management of Data},
  year = {1988},
  pages = {277--285},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  address = {Chicago, IL},
  keywords = {file access pattern, disk prefetch, file system, pario-bib},
  comment = {A specialized database system for particle physics codes. Valuable
  for its description of access patterns and subsequent file access
  requirements. Particle-in-cell codes iterate over timesteps, updating the
  position of each particle, and then the characteristics of each cell in the
  grid. Particles may move from cell to cell. Particle update needs itself and
  nearby gridcell data. The whole dataset is too big for memory, and each
  timestep must be stored on disk for later analysis anyway. Regular file
  systems are inadequate: specialized DBMS is more appropriate. Characteristics
  needed by their application class: multidimensional access (by particle type
  or by location, i.e., multiple views of the data), coordination between grid
  and particle data, coordination between processors, coordinated access to
  meta-data, inverted files, horizontal clustering, large blocking of data,
  asynchronous I/O, array data, complicated joins, and prefetching according to
  user-prespecified order. Note that many of these things can be provided by a
  file system, but that most are hard to come by in typical file systems, if
  not impossible. Many of these features are generalizable to other
  applications.}
}