High Performance Clustering of Social Images in a Map-Collective Programming Model

Abstract—Large-scale iterative computations are common in many important data mining and machine learning algorithms needed in analytics and deep learning. In most of these applications, individual iterations can be specified as MapReduce computations, leading to the Iterative MapReduce programming model for efficient execution of data-intensive iterative computations interoperably between HPC and cloud environments. Further one needs additional communication patterns from those familiar in MapReduce and we base our initial architecture on collectives that integrate capabilities developed by the MPI and MapReduce communities. This leads us to the Map-Collective programming model which here we develop based on requirements of a range of applications by extending our existing Iterative MapReduce environment Twister. This paper studies the implications of large scale Social Image clustering where large scale problems study 10-100 million images represented as points in a high dimensional (up to 2048) vector space which need to be divided into up to 1-10 million clusters. This Kmeans application needs 5 stages in each iteration: Broadcast, Map, Shuffle, Reduce and Combine, and this paper focuses on collective communication stages where large data transfers demand performance optimization. By comparing and combining ideas from MapReduce and MPI communities, we show that a topology-aware and pipeline-based broadcasting method gives better performance than other MPI and (Iterative) MapReduce systems