A Parallel Nonnegative Tensor Factorization Algorithm for Mining Global Climate Data

  • Authors:
  • Qiang Zhang;Michael W. Berry;Brian T. Lamb;Tabitha Samuel

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Biostatistical Sciences, Wake Forest University Health Sciences, Medical Center Blvd, Winston Salem, NC 27157;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-3450;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-3450;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-3450

  • Venue:
  • ICCS 2009 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Science
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Increasingly large datasets acquired by NASA for global climate studies demand larger computation memory and higher CPU speed to mine out useful and revealing information. While boosting the CPU frequency is getting harder, clustering multiple lower performance computers thus becomes increasingly popular. This prompts a trend of parallelizing the existing algorithms and methods by mathematicians and computer scientists. In this paper, we take on the task of parallelizing the Nonnegative Tensor Factorization (NTF) method, with the purposes of distributing large datasets into each cluster node and thus reducing the demand on a single node, blocking and localizing the computation at the maximal degree, and finally minimizing the memory use for storing matrices or tensors by exploiting their structural relationships. Numerical experiments were performed on a NASA global sea surface temperature dataset and result factors were analyzed and discussed.