JCSE, vol. 5, no. 2, pp.111-120, 2011

DOI: 10.5626/JCSE.2011.5.2.111/

Parallel Multithreaded Processing for Data Set Summarization on Multicore CPUs

Carlos Ordonez, Mario Navas, Carlos Garcia-Alvarado
Department of Computer Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Abstract: Data mining algorithms should exploit new hardware technologies to accelerate computations. Such goal is difficult to achieve in database management system (DBMS) due to its complex internal subsystems and because data mining numeric computations of large data sets are difficult to optimize. This paper explores taking advantage of existing multithreaded capabilities of multicore CPUs as well as caching in RAM memory to efficiently compute summaries of a large data set, a fundamental data mining problem. We introduce parallel algorithms working on multiple threads, which overcome the row aggregation processing bottleneck of accessing secondary storage, while maintaining linear time complexity with respect to data set size. Our proposal is based on a combination of table scans and parallel multithreaded processing among multiple cores in the CPU. We introduce several database-style and hardware-level optimizations: caching row blocks of the input table, managing available RAM memory, interleaving I/O and CPU processing, as well as tuning the number of working threads. We experimentally benchmark our algorithms with large data sets on a DBMS running on a computer with a multicore CPU. We show that our algorithms outperform existing DBMS mechanisms in computing aggregations of multidimensional data summaries, especially as dimensionality grows. Furthermore, we show that local memory allocation (RAM block size) does not have a significant impact when the thread management algorithm distributes the workload among a fixed number of threads. Our proposal is unique in the sense that we do not modify or require access to the DBMS source code, but instead, we extend the DBMS with analytic functionality by developing User-Defined Functions.

Keyword: Algorithms; Data mining; Multicore CPU; Table scan; Thread; DBMS

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