  This paper studies parallelization schemes for stochastic Vector Quantization
algorithms in order to obtain time speed-ups using distributed resources. We
show that the most intuitive parallelization scheme does not lead to better
performances than the sequential algorithm. Another distributed scheme is
therefore introduced which obtains the expected speed-ups. Then, it is improved
to fit implementation on distributed architectures where communications are
slow and inter-machines synchronization too costly. The schemes are tested with
simulated distributed architectures and, for the last one, with Microsoft
Windows Azure platform obtaining speed-ups up to 32 Virtual Machines.
