Papyrus: A System for Data Mining over Local and Wide Area Clusters and Super-Clusters

Data mining is the semi-automatic discovery of patterns, correlations, changes, associations, and anomalies in large data sets. Traditionally, in a broad sense, statistics has focused on the assumption-driven analysis of data, while data mining has focused on the discovery-driven analysis of data. By discoverydriven, we mean the automatic search or semi-automatic search for interesting patterns and models. With the explosion of the commodity internet and the emergence of wide area high performance networks, mining distributed data is becoming recognized as a fundamental scientific challenge. In this paper, we introduce a system called Papyrus for distributed data mining over commodity and high performance networks and give some preliminary experimental results about its performance. We are particularly interested in data mining over clusters of workstations, distributed clusters connected by high performance networks (super-clusters), and distributed clusters and super-clusters connected by commodity networks (meta-clusters). As a motivating example taken from [7], consider the problem of searching for correlations between twenty five years of sunspot data archived on a server in Boulder and 80 years of Southern night marine air temperature data archived on a server in Maryland. The goal of this data mining query might be to understand whether sunspots are correlated with climatic shifts in temperature. Notice that