Pardicle: Parallel Approximate Density-Based Clustering

DBSCAN is a widely used is density-based clustering algorithm for particle data well-known for its ability to isolate arbitrarily-shaped clusters and to filter noise data. The algorithm is super-linear (O(nlogn)) and computationally expensive for large datasets. Given the need for speed, we propose a fast heuristic algorithm for DBSCAN using density based sampling, which performs equally well in quality compared to exact algorithms, but is more than an order of magnitude faster. Our experiments on astrophysics and synthetic massive datasets (8.5 billion numbers) shows that our approximate algorithm is up to 56× faster than exact algorithms with almost identical quality (Omega-Index ≥ 0.99). We develop a new parallel DBSCAN algorithm, which uses dynamic partitioning to improve load balancing and locality. We demonstrate near-linear speedup on shared memory (15× using 16 cores, single node Intel® Xeon® processor) and distributed memory (3917× using 4096 cores, multinode) computers, with 2× additional performance improvement using Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors. Additionally, existing exact algorithms can achieve up to 3.4 times speedup using dynamic partitioning.