Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Data Mining Information Sciences, Elsevier The sheer volume of new data, which is being generated at an increasingly fast pace, has already produced an anticipated data deluge that is difficult to challenge. We are in the presence of an overwhelming vast quantity of data, owing to how easy is to produce or derive digital data. Even the storage of this massive amount of data is becoming a highly demanding task, outpacing the current development of hardware and software infrastructure. Nonetheless, this effort must be undertaken now for the preservation, organization and long-term maintenance of these precious data. However, the collected data is useless without our ability fully understand and make use of it. Therefore, we need new algorithms to address this challenge. Data mining techniques and algorithms to process huge amount of data in order to extract useful and interesting information have become popular in many different contexts. Algorithms are required to make sense of data automatically and in efficient ways. Nonetheless, even though sequential computer systems performance is improving, they are not suitable to keep up with the increase in the demand for data mining applications and the data size. Moreover, the main memory of sequential systems may not be enough to hold all the data related to current applications. This Special Issue takes into account the increasing interest in the design and implementation of parallel and distributed data mining algorithms. Parallel algorithms can easily address both the running time and memory requirement issues, by exploiting the vast aggregate main memory and processing power of processors and accelerators available on parallel computers. Anyway, parallelizing existing algorithms in order to achieve good performance and scalability with regard to massive datasets is not trivial. Indeed, it is of paramount importance a good data organization and decomposition strategy in order to balance the workload while minimizing data dependences. Another concern is related to minimizing synchronization and communication overhead. Finally, I/O costs should be minimized as well. Creating breakthrough parallel algorithms for high-performance data mining applications requires addressing several key computing problems which may lead to novel solutions and new insights in interdisciplinary applications. Moreover, increasingly the data is spread among different geographically distributed sites. Centralized processing of this data is very inefficient and expensive. In some cases, it may even be impractical and subject to security risks. Therefore, processing the data minimizing the amount of data being exchanged whilst guaranteeing at the same time correctness and efficiency is an extremely important challenge. Distributed data mining performs data analysis and mining in a fundamentally distributed manner paying careful attention to resource constraints, in particular bandwidth limitation, privacy concerns and computing power. The focus of this Special Issue is on all forms of advances in high-performance and distributed data mining algorithms and applications. The topics relevant to the Special Issue include (but are not limited to) the following. TOPICS OF INTEREST Scalable parallel data mining algorithms using message-passing, shared-memory or hybrid programming paradigms Exploiting modern parallel architectures including FPGA, GPU and many-core accelerators for parallel data mining applications Middleware for high-performance data mining on grid and cloud environments Benchmarking and performance studies of high-performance data mining applications Novel programming paradigms to support high-performance computing for data mining Performance models for high-performance data mining applications and middleware Programming models, tools, and environments for high-performance computing in data mining Map-reduce based parallel data mining algorithms Caching, streaming, pipelining, and other optimization techniques for data management in high-performance computing for data mining Novel distributed data mining algorithms SUBMISSION GUIDELINES All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted electronically through Elsevier Editorial System (EES) at http://ees.elsevier.com/ins (http://ees.elsevier.com/ins). The authors must select as “SI:PDDM” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process. A detailed submission guideline is available as “Guide to Authors” at: http://www.elsevier.com/journals/information-sciences/0020-0255/guide-for-au.... IMPORTANT DATES Submission deadline: December 1th, 2017 First round notification: March 1th, 2018 Revised version due: May 1st, 2018 Final notification: June 1st, 2018 Camera-ready due: July 1st, 2018 Publication tentative date: October 2018 Guest editors: Massimo Cafaro, Email: massimo.cafaro@unisalento.it University of Salento, Italy and Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, Foundation Italo Epicoco, Email: italo.epicoco@unisalento.it University of Salento, Italy and Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change, Foundation Marco Pulimeno, Email: marco.pulimeno@unisalento.it University of Salento, Italy - ************************************************************************************ Massimo Cafaro, Ph.D. Associate Professor Dept. of Engineering for Innovation University of Salento, Lecce, Italy Via per Monteroni 73100 Lecce, Italy Voice/Fax +39 0832 297371 Web http://sara.unisalento.it/~cafaro E-mail massimo.cafaro@unisalento.it cafaro@ieee.org cafaro@acm.org CMCC Foundation Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change Via Augusto Imperatore, 16 - 73100 Lecce massimo.cafaro@cmcc.it ************************************************************************************