A parallel tabu search heuristic for clustering data sets

Clustering methods partition a set of objects into clusters such that objects in the same cluster are more similar to each other than objects in different clusters according to some defined criteria. In this paper, a parallel tabu search heuristic for solving this problem is developed and implemented on a cluster of PCs. We observe that parallelization does not affect the quality of clustering results, but provides a large saving of the computational times in practice.