Parallelizing Affinity Propagation Using Graphics Processing Units for Spatial Cluster Analysis over Big Geospatial Data.

Introduced in 2007, affinity propagation (AP) is a relatively new machine learning algorithm for unsupervised classification that has seldom been applied in geospatial applications. One bottleneck is that AP could hardly handle large data, and a serial computer program would take a long time to complete an AP calculation. New multicore and manycore computer architectures, combined with application accelerators, show promise for achieving scalable geocomputation by exploiting task and data levels of parallelism. This chapter introduces our recent progress in parallelizing the AP algorithm on a graphics processing unit (GPU) for spatial cluster analysis, the potential of the proposed solution to process big geospatial data, and its broader impact for the GIScience community.