1. A method for mining association rules in a database that is divided into multiple partitions associated with respective computing nodes, the method comprising: transmitting messages among the nodes with respect to local support of an itemset in the respective partitions of the database; responsive to the messages transmitted by a subset of the nodes, determining the itemset to be globally frequent in the database before the nodes outside the subset have transmitted the messages with respect to the local support of the itemset in their respective partitions; and computing an association rule with respect to the itemset, responsive to having determined the itemset to be globally frequent.