Parallel Clustering of High-Dimensional Social Media Data Streams

We introduce Cloud DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) as an analysis environment supporting scientific discovery through integrated parallel batch and streaming processing, and apply it to one representative domain application: social media data stream clustering. In this context, recent work demonstrated that high-quality clusters can be generated by representing the data points using high-dimensional vectors that reflect textual content and social network information. However, due to the high cost of similarity computation, sequential implementations of even single-pass algorithms cannot keep up with the speed of real-world streams. This paper presents our efforts in meeting the constraints of realtimesocial media stream clustering through parallelization in Cloud DIKW. Specifically, we focus on two system-level issues. Firstly, most stream processing engines such as Apache Storm organize distributed workers in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which makes it difficult to dynamically synchronize the state of parallel clustering workers. We tackle this challenge by creating a separate synchronization channel using a pub-sub messaging system (ActiveMQ in our case). Secondly, due to the sparsity of the high-dimensional vectors, the size of cancroids grows quickly as new data points are assigned tithe clusters. As a result, traditional synchronization that directly broadcasts cluster cancroids becomes too expensive and limits the scalability of the parallel algorithm. We address this problem by communicating only dynamic changes of the clusters rather than the whole centred vectors. Our algorithm under Cloud DIKWcan process the Twitter 10% data stream ("gardenhose") in realtimewith 96-way parallelism. By natural improvements to CloudDIKW, including advanced collective communication techniques developed in our Harp project, we will be able to process the full Twitter data stream in real-time with 1000-way parallelism. Our use of powerful general software subsystems will enable many other applications that need integration of streaming and batch data analytics.