A Low-Cost Energy-Efficient Raspberry Pi Cluster for Data Mining Algorithms

Data mining algorithms are essential tools to extract information from the increasing number of large datasets, also called Big Data. However, these algorithms demand huge amounts of computing power to achieve reliable results. Although conventional High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms can deliver such performance, they are commonly expensive and power-hungry. This paper presents a study of an unconventional low-cost energy-efficient HPC cluster composed of Raspberry Pi nodes. The performance, power and energy efficiency obtained from this unconventional platform is compared with a well-known coprocessor used in HPC (Intel Xeon Phi) for two data mining algorithms: Apriori and K-Means. The experimental results showed that the Raspberry Pi cluster can consume up to 88.35% and 85.17% less power than Intel Xeon Phi when running Apriori and K-Means, respectively, and up to 45.51% less energy when running Apriori.