Abstract: A method is provided for parallel and cooperative processing of data in a system wherein a coordinator process cooperates with one or more agent processes to which portions of the data processing function is off loaded. The agent processes read and process the data and accumulate a partial result. Each agent process, responsive to statistics collected on the content of the data processed, returns a partial result of the processing to the coordinator process. These steps are repeated iteratively until the processing has been completed. In a specific application, the performance of data processing systems is improved by speeding up database group-by queries. The group-by operation processing is distributed between the host central processing unit (CPU) and the input/output (I/O) processors (IOPs). Essentially, the IOPs are sent group-by requests to be performed on a set of disk blocks (extents), along with a predicate for tuples to be selected for query.

Abstract: A special directly executable instruction, Fetch Instruction Operand Address (FIOA) is accessed in response to encountering a complex non-directly executable instruction. Execution of the FIOA instruction causes generation of control signals for address calculation of the operands in the non-directly executable instruction by the same I phase hardware used by other directly executable instructions.