The next question is: How long does off-line processing take and how much disk space do the memory maps of scan/quad-tree data require?

Processing Time
QIS actually creates two separate memory maps and writes them to disk:

1) the scan tree
2) the quad-tree

In the chart below the second column represents the time needed to scan the GDSII file and write the map to disk, the third column is the time to build the quad-tree and write the map to disk, the fourth column is the sum of the first two columns.

The fifth and sixth column are the size in MB of the scan-tree memory map and the quad-tree memory map.

These measurements were made on a Sun Ultra Sparc Blade equipped with 2X 750MHz CPU's and 8 GBytes of RAM. (the dual CPU's are of no help as the scan and quad-tree processes cannot run in parallel or otherwise benefit from multiple processors.)