title: Glimmer: multilevel MDS on the GPU.
abstract: We present Glimmer, a new multilevel algorithm for multidimensional scaling designed to exploit modern graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware. We also present GPU-SF, a parallel, force-based subsystem used by Glimmer. Glimmer organizes input into a hierarchy of levels and recursively applies GPU-SF to combine and refine the levels. The multilevel nature of the algorithm makes local minima less likely while the GPU parallelism improves speed of computation. We propose a robust termination condition for GPU-SF based on a filtered approximation of the normalized stress function. We demonstrate the benefits of Glimmer in terms of speed, normalized stress, and visual quality against several previous algorithms for a range of synthetic and real benchmark datasets. We also show that the performance of Glimmer on GPUs is substantially faster than a CPU implementation of the same algorithm.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. sfingram@cs.ubc.ca
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ingram
authors.forename: Tamara
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Munzner
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Olano