Graphics Processing Unit Enhanced Parallel Document Flocking Clustering

Abstract: Analyzing and clustering documents is a complex problem. One explored method of solving this problem borrows from nature, imitating the flocking behavior of birds. One limitation of this method of document clustering is its complexity O(n). As the number of documents grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to generate results in a reasonable amount of time. In the last few years, the graphics processing unit (GPU) has received attention for its ability to solve highly-parallel and semi-parallel problems much faster than the traditional sequential processor. In this paper, we have conducted research to exploit this architecture and apply its strengths to the flocking based document clustering problem. Using the CUDA platform from NVIDIA, we developed a document flocking implementation to be run on the NVIDIA GEFORCE GPU. Performance gains ranged from thirty-six to nearly sixty times improvement of the GPU over the CPU implementation.