Heterogeneous Distributed Big Data Clustering on Sparse Grids

Abstract

Clustering is an important task in data mining that has become more challenging due to the ever-increasing size of available datasets. To cope with these big data scenarios, a high-performance clustering approach is required. Sparse grid clustering is a density-based clustering method that uses a sparse grid density estimation as its central building block. The underlying density estimation approach enables the detection of clusters with non-convex shapes and without a predetermined number of clusters. In this work, we introduce a new distributed and performance-portable variant of the sparse grid clustering algorithm that is suited for big data settings. Our computed kernels were implemented in OpenCL to enable portability across a wide range of architectures. For distributed environments, we added a manager–worker scheme that was implemented using MPI. In experiments on two supercomputers, Piz Daint and Hazel Hen, with up to 100 million data points in a ten-dimensional dataset, we show the performance and scalability of our approach. The dataset with 100 million data points was clustered in 1198 s using 128 nodes of Piz Daint. This translates to an overall performance of 352 TFLOPS . On the node-level, we provide results for two GPUs, Nvidia’s Tesla P100 and the AMD FirePro W8100, and one processor-based platform that uses Intel Xeon E5-2680v3 processors. In these experiments, we achieved between 43% and 66% of the peak performance across all computed kernels and devices, demonstrating the performance portability of our approach.