High-throughput fuzzy clustering on heterogeneous architectures

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is pushing the next economic revolution in which the main players are data and immediacy. IoT is increasingly producing large amounts of data that are now classified as “dark data” because most are created but never analyzed. The efficient analysis of this data deluge is becoming mandatory in order to transform it into meaningful information. Among the techniques available for this purpose, clustering techniques, which classify different patterns into groups, have proven to be very useful for obtaining knowledge from the data. However, clustering algorithms are computationally hard, especially when it comes to large data sets and, therefore, they require the most powerful computing platforms on the market. In this paper, we investigate coarse and fine grain parallelization strategies in Intel and Nvidia architectures of fuzzy minimals (FM) algorithm; a fuzzy clustering technique that has shown very good results in the literature. We provide an in-depth performance analysis of the FM’s main bottlenecks, reporting a speed-up factor of up to 40× compared to the sequential counterpart version.