Centaurus: K-Means as a Service

Centaurus is a scalable, easy to use, cloud service for k-means clustering that automatically deploys and executes multiple k-means variants concurrently, and then scores them to provide a clustering recommendation. Centaurus scores clustering results using Bayesian Information Criterion to determine the best model fit across cluster results. Visualization and diagnostic tools are available to help users interpret clustering results.

Authors: Angad Gill, Nevena Golubovic

Architecture

The system consists of a total of five services:

• Frontend: The frontend is provided by a Python Flask server (site/frontend.py) paired with Gunicorn and NGINX.

• Backend: There are two options for the backend:

  1. Worker: Python Celery to perform all analysis tasks asynchronously (site/worker.py).
  2. Queue: RabbitMQ as a message broker between the Frontend and Workers.
  3. Database: Centaurus can be used with either NoSQL (MongoDB) or SQL (Postgres) to store all parameters for analysis and results of all tasks associated with each analysis.
  4. Storage: Amazon S3 to store the data files uploaded by users.

  

Purpose

The purpose of the Frontend is to do the following:

1. Provide an interface for users to upload their data files to the Backend Storage.
2. Provide an interface for users to view the status and results of the analysis.
3. Generate all the tasks (individual k-means fit runs) needed to complete a job.
4. Generate necessary plots and tables needed for 1. and 2.
5. Allow users to rerun tasks that failed.

The purpose of the Backend Worker is to do the following:

1. Run the analysis based on the data and parameters provided in the Backend Queue.
2. When done, update the Backend Database with the analysis results.

Installation

See site/README.md.

Publications:

N. Golubovic, A. Gill, C. Krintz, R. Wolski, "CENTAURUS: A Cloud Service for K-means Clustering", 2017 IEEE 15th Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, 15th Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, 3rd Intl Conf on Big Data Intelligence and Computing and Cyber Science and Technology Congress