Multivariate geographic clustering in a metacomputing environment using Globus
G. Mahinthakumar, Forrest M. Hoffman, William W. Hargrove, Nicholas T. Karonis · 1999
The authors present a metacomputing application of multivariate, nonhierarchical statistical clustering to geographic environmental data from the 48 conterminous United States in order to produce maps of regions of ecological similarity, called ecoregions. These maps represent finer scale regionalizations than do those generated by the traditional technique: an expert with a marker pen. Several variables (e.g., temperature, organic matter, rainfall etc.) thought to affect the growth of vegetation are clustered at resolutions as fine as one square kilometer (1 km 2). These data can represent over 7.8 million map cells in an n–dimensional (n = 9 to 25) data space. A parallel version of the iterative statistical clustering algorithm is developed by the authors using the MPI (Message Passing Interface) message passing routines. The parallel algorithm uses a classical, self–scheduling, single–program, multiple data (SPMD) organization; performs dynamic load balancing for reasonable performance in heterogeneous metacomputing environments; and provides fault tolerance by saving intermediate results for easy restarts in case of hardware failure. The parallel algorithm was tested on various geographically distributed heterogeneous metacomputing configurations involving an IBM