Frequent Items Mining Acceleration Exploiting Fast Parallel Sorting on the GPU

In this paper, we show how to employ Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to provide an effcient and highperformance solution for finding frequent items in data streams. We discuss several design alternatives and present an implementation that exploits the great capability of graphics processors in parallel sorting. We provide an exhaustive evaluation of performances, quality results and several design trade-offs. Onanoff-the-shelf GPU, the fastest of our implementations can process over 200 million items per second, which is better than the best known solution based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and CPUs. Moreover, in previous approaches, performances are directly related to the skewness of the input data distribution, while in our approach, the high throughput is independent from this factor