Porting Decision Tree Algorithms to Multicore using FastFlow

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal-change approach to parallelize the C4.5 decision tree algorithm on multicore systems using FastFlow, achieving significant speedups with little code modification.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, efficient method for porting decision tree algorithms to multicore architectures with minimal code changes.

Findings

Up to 7X speedup on dual-quad core Intel machine

Minimal code modifications needed for parallelization

Effective exploitation of thread-level parallelism in decision trees

Abstract

The whole computer hardware industry embraced multicores. For these machines, the extreme optimisation of sequential algorithms is no longer sufficient to squeeze the real machine power, which can be only exploited via thread-level parallelism. Decision tree algorithms exhibit natural concurrency that makes them suitable to be parallelised. This paper presents an approach for easy-yet-efficient porting of an implementation of the C4.5 algorithm on multicores. The parallel porting requires minimal changes to the original sequential code, and it is able to exploit up to 7X speedup on an Intel dual-quad core machine.