High Performance Computing with the Array Package for Java: A Case Study using Data Mining

This paper discusses several techniques used in developing a parallel, production quality data mining application in Java. We started by developing three sequential versions of a product recommendation data mining application: (i) a Fortran 90 version used as a performance reference, (ii) a plain Java implementation that only uses the primitive array structures from the language, and (iii) a baseline Java implementation that uses our Array package for Java. This Array package provides parallelism at the level of individual Array and BLAS operations. Using this Array package, we also developed two parallel Java versions of the data mining application: one that relies entirely on the implicit parallelism provided by the Array package, and another that is explicitly parallel at the application level. We discuss the design of the Array package, as well as the design of the data mining application. We compare the trade-offs between performance and the abstraction level the different Java versions present to the application programmer. Our studies show that, although a plain Java implementation performs poorly, the Java implementation with the Array package is quite competitive in performance with Fortran. We achieve a single processor performance of 109 Mflops, or 91% of Fortran performance, on a 332 MHz PowerPC 604e processor. Both the implicitly and explicitly parallel forms of our Java implementations also parallelize well. On an SMP with four of those PowerPC processors, the implicitly parallel form achieves 290 Mflops with no effort from the application programmer, while the explicitly parallel form achieves 340 Mflops.