Parallel Clustering Algorithms: Survey

Clustering is grouping input data sets into subsets, called ’clusters’ within which the elements are somewhat similar. In general, clustering is an unsupervised learning task as very little or no prior knowledge is given except the input data sets. The tasks have been used in many fields and therefore various clustering algorithms have been developed. Clustering task is, however, computationally expensive as many of the algorithms require iterative or recursive procedures and most of real-life data is high dimensional. Therefore, the parallelization of clustering algorithms is inevitable, and various parallel clustering algorithms have been implemented and applied to many applications. In this paper, we review a variety of clustering algorithms and their parallel versions as well. Although the parallel clustering algorithms have been used for many applications, the clustering tasks are applied as preprocessing steps for parallelization of other algorithms too. Therefore, the applications of parallel clustering algorithms and the clustering algorithms for parallel computations are described in this paper.