Toward terabyte pattern mining: an architecture-conscious solution

We present a strategy for mining frequent item sets from terabyte-scale data sets on cluster systems. The algorithm embraces the holistic notion of architecture-conscious datamining, taking into account the capabilities of the processor, the memory hierarchy and the available network interconnects. Optimizations have been designed for lowering communication costs using compressed data structures and a succinct encoding. Optimizations for improving cache, memory and I/O utilization using pruningand tiling techniques, and smart data placement strategies are also employed. We leverage the extended memory spaceand computational resources of a distributed message-passing clusterto design a scalable solution, where each node can extend its metastructures beyond main memory by leveraging 64-bit architecture support. Our solution strategy is presented in the context of FPGrowth, a well-studied and rather efficient frequent pattern mining algorithm. Results demonstrate that the proposed strategy result in near-linearscaleup on up to 48 nodes.