Performance Analysis of Parallel Apriori on Heterogeneous Nodes

The paper analyzes the performance of parallel apriori algorithm on heterogeneous nodes with different datasets and over n processors on a commodity cluster of machines. In the apriori algorithm all processes need to synchronize after every pass. If any process is assigned more load than other processes in the system, the slowest process will dictate the speed of the program. It is therefore important to ensure that load is equally balanced among all processes. Memory, speed of the processor and cache play a significant role in the processing capacity of the system. The experiments show that nodes with different configurations affect the performance of the parallel apriori algorithm. In order to maximize the efficiency it is required to balance the data set based on the processing speed of the various nodes present in the cluster.