ARC 2014: A Multidimensional FPGA-Based Parallel DBSCAN Architecture

Neil Scicluna, Christos-Savvas Bouganis

Abstract: Clustering large numbers of data points is a very computationally demanding task that often needs to be accelerated in order to be useful in practical applications. This work focuses on the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm, which is one of the state-of-the-art clustering algorithms, and targets its acceleration using an FPGA device. The article presents an optimized, scalable, and parameterizable architecture that takes advantage of the internal memory structure of modern FPGAs in order to deliver a high-performance clustering system. Post-synthesis simulation results show that the developed system can obtain mean speedups of 31× in real-world tests and 202× in synthetic tests when compared to state-of-the-art software counterparts running on a quad-core 3.4GHz Intel i7-2600k. Additionally, this implementation is also capable of clustering data with any number of dimensions without impacting the performance.