Acceleration of Frequent Itemset Mining on FPGA using SDAccel and Vivado HLS

Frequent itemset mining (FIM) is a widely-used data-mining technique for discovering sets of frequently-occurring items in large databases. However, FIM is highly time-consuming when datasets grow in size. FPGAs have shown great promise for accelerating computationally-intensive algorithms, but they are hard to use with traditional HDL-based design methods. The recent introduction of Xilinx SDAccel development environment for the C/C++/OpenCL languages allows developers to utilize FPGA's potential without long development periods and extensive hardware knowledge. This paper presents an optimized implementation of an FIM algorithm on FPGA using SDAccel and Vivado HLS. Performance and power consumption are measured with various datasets. When compared to state-of-the-art solutions, this implementation offers up to 3.2× speedup over a 6-core CPU, and has a better energy efficiency as compared with a GPU. Our preliminary results on the new XCKU115 FPGA are even more promising: they demonstrate a comparable performance with a state-of-the-art HDL FPGA implementation and better performance compared to the GPU.