Parallel data mining from multicore to cloudy grids

Abstract

We describe a suite of data mining tools that cover clustering, information retrieval and the mapping of high dimensional data to low dimensions for visualization. Preliminary applications are given to particle physics, bioinformatics and medical informatics. The data vary in dimension from low (220), high (thousands) to undefined (sequences with dissimilarities but not vectors defined). We use deterministic annealing to provide more robust algorithms that are relatively insensitive to local minima. We discuss the algorithm structure and their mapping to parallel architectures of different types and look at the performance of the algorithms on three classes of system; multicore, cluster and Grid using a MapReduce style algorithm. Each approach is suitable in different application scenarios. We stress that data analysis/mining of large datasets can be a supercomputer application.