Scalable parallel OPTICS data clustering using graph algorithmic techniques

OPTICS is a hierarchical density-based data clustering algorithm that discovers arbitrary-shaped clusters and eliminates noise using adjustable reachability distance thresholds. Parallelizing OPTICS is considered challenging as the algorithm exhibits a strongly sequential data access order. We present a scalable parallel OPTICS algorithm (POPTICS) designed using graph algorithmic concepts. To break the data access sequentiality, POPTICS exploits the similarities between the OPTICS algorithm and PRIM´s Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm. Additionally, we use the disjoint-set data structure to achieve a high parallelism for distributed cluster extraction. Using high dimensional datasets containing up to a billion floating point numbers, we show scalable speedups of up to 27.5 for our OpenMP implementation on a 40-core shared-memory machine, and up to 3,008 for our MPI implementation on a 4,096-core distributed-memory machine. We also show that the quality of the results given by POPTICS is comparable to those given by the classical OPTICS algorithm.