Parallel and Grid-Based Data Mining

Abstract

Data Mining often is a computing intesive and time requiring process. For this reason, several Data Mining systems have been implemented on parallel computing platforms to achieve high performance in the analysis of large data sets. Moreover, when large data repositories are coupled with geographical distribution of data, users and systems, more sophisticated technologies are needed to implement high-performace distributed KDD systems. Since computational Grids emerged as privileged platforms for distributed computing, a growing number of Grid-based KDD systems has been proposed. In this chapter we first discuss different ways to exploit parallelism in the main Data Mining techniques and algorithms, then we discuss Grid-based KDD systems. Finally, we introduce the Knowledge Grid, an environment which makes use of standard Grid middleware to support the development of parallel and distributed knowledge discovery applications.