FPGA based accelerator for parallel DBSCAN algorithm

Data mining is playing a vital role in various application fields. One important issue in data mining is clustering, which is a process of grouping data with high similarity. Density-based clustering is an effective method that can find clusters in arbitrary shapes in feature space, and DBSCAN (Density-Based Algorithm for Discovering Clusters in Large Spatial Databases with Noise) is a basic one. With the tremendous increase of data sizes, the processing time taken by clustering algorithms can be several hours or more. In recent years, FPGA has provided a notable accelerating performance in data mining applications. In this paper, we study parallel DBSCAN algorithm and map it to FPGA based on the task-level and data-level parallelism architecture. Experimental results show that this accelerator can provide up to 86x speedup over a software implementation on general-purpose processor and 2.9x over a software implementation on graphic processor.