A High Performance Computing Framework for Data Mining

Abstract

Mining large data sets is no longer the prerogative of computer scientists - specialists in a wide variety of domains are performing analytics as a day-to-day activity. Often such analyses are specific to the domain and analysts are required to devise new algorithms or techniques. For such scenarios, providing a high-level programming environment that delivers high performance on clusters is a challenge. We propose a framework that supports high-level programming using domain abstractions in data mining while delivering scalable performance on commodity clusters i.e. clusters of multi-core workstations. This framework includes a domain specific programming language, DWARF, to enable data mining specialists to rapidly prototype algorithms. DWARF is supported by a compiler that automatically parallelizes code by identifying domain specific patterns and translating them to parallel code that exploits data parallelism and task parallelism. The compiler generates code for a hybrid virtual machine supporting distributed memory model at the top level and shared memory model nested within. The code generated by the compiler can be scheduled on commodity clusters. We compare the proposed framework with other frameworks commonly used for data mining on distributed platforms.