An Architecture for Efficient Hardware Data Mining using Reconfigurable Computing Systems

Abstract

The Apriori algorithm is a fundamental correlation-based data mining kernel used in a variety of fields. The innovation in this paper is a highly parallel custom architecture implemented on a reconfigurable computing system. Using this "bitmapped CAM," the time and area required for executing the subset operations fundamental to data mining can be significantly reduced. The bitmapped CAM architecture implementation on an FPGA-accelerated high performance workstation provides a performance acceleration of orders of magnitude over software-based systems. The bitmapped CAM utilizes redundancy within the candidate data to efficiently store and process many subset operations simultaneously. The efficiency of this operation allows 140 units to process about 2,240 subset operations simultaneously. Using industry-standard benchmarking databases, we have tested the bitmapped CAM architecture and shown the platform provides a minimum of 24times (and often much higher) time performance advantage over the fastest software Apriori implementations