This paper proposes a general system for compute-intensive graph mining tasks that find from a big graph all subgraphs that satisfy certain requirements (e.g., graph matching and community detection). Due to the broad range of applications of such tasks, many single-threaded algorithms have been proposed. However, graphs such as online social networks and knowledge graphs often have billions of vertices and edges, which require distributed processing in order to scale. Unfortunately, existing distributed graph processing systems such as Pregel and GraphLab are designed for data-intensive analytics, and are inefficient for compute-intensive graph mining tasks since computation over any data is coupled with the data's access that involves network transmission. We propose a distributed graph mining framework, called G-thinker, which is designed for compute-intensive graph mining workloads. G-thinker provides an intuitive graph-exploration API for the convenient implementation of various graph mining algorithms, and the runtime engine provides efficient execution with bounded memory consumption, light network communication, and parallelism between computation and communication. Extensive experiments were conducted, which demonstrate that G-thinker is orders of magnitude faster than existing solution, and can scale to graphs that are two orders of magnitude larger given the same hardware resources.
The key problem is, nevertheless, that vertex-centric computation is mainly for data-intensive computation, and generates a large number of messages to transmit for (e.g., for pulling vertices to construct decomposed subgraphs). We call the problem as communication-in-the-chain . In fact, @cite_30 indicates that a vertex-centric program is most scalable if each iteration requires linear computation and communication cost, and it runs for a small number of iterations. This essentially implies that vertex-centric systems are for graph problems with a low computational complexity.
@cite_30
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Vertex centric models for large scale graph processing are gaining traction due to their simple distributed programming abstraction. However, pure vertex centric algorithms under-perform due to large communication overheads and slow iterative convergence. We introduce GoFFish a scalable sub-graph centric framework co-designed with a distributed persistent graph storage for large scale graph analytics on commodity clusters, offering the added natural flexibility of shared memory sub-graph computation. We map Connected Components, SSSP and PageRank algorithms to this model and empirically analyze them for several real world graphs, demonstrating orders of magnitude improvements, in some cases, compared to Apache Giraph’s vertex centric framework. Vertex-centric graph processing systems such as Pregel, PowerGraph, or GraphX recently gained popularity due to their superior performance of data analytics on graph-structured data. These systems exploit the graph structure to improve data access locality during computation, making use of specialized graph partitioning algorithms. Recent partitioning techniques assume a uniform and constant amount of data exchanged between graph vertices (i.e., uniform vertex traffic) and homogeneous underlying network costs. However, in real-world scenarios vertex traffic and network costs are heterogeneous. This leads to suboptimal partitioning decisions and inefficient graph processing. To this end, we designed GrapH, the first graph processing system using vertex-cut graph partitioning that considers both, diverse vertex traffic and heterogeneous network, to minimize overall communication costs. The main idea is to avoid frequent communication over expensive network links using an adaptive edge migration strategy. Our evaluations show an improvement of 60 in communication costs compared to state-of-the-art partitioning approaches. Many practical computing problems concern large graphs. Standard examples include the Web graph and various social networks. The scale of these graphs - in some cases billions of vertices, trillions of edges - poses challenges to their efficient processing. In this paper we present a computational model suitable for this task. Programs are expressed as a sequence of iterations, in each of which a vertex can receive messages sent in the previous iteration, send messages to other vertices, and modify its own state and that of its outgoing edges or mutate graph topology. This vertex-centric approach is flexible enough to express a broad set of algorithms. The model has been designed for efficient, scalable and fault-tolerant implementation on clusters of thousands of commodity computers, and its implied synchronicity makes reasoning about programs easier. Distribution-related details are hidden behind an abstract API. The result is a framework for processing large graphs that is expressive and easy to program. To meet the challenge of processing rapidly growing graph and network data created by modern applications, a number of distributed graph processing systems have emerged, such as Pregel and GraphLab. All these systems divide input graphs into partitions, and employ a "think like a vertex" programming model to support iterative graph computation. This vertex-centric model is easy to program and has been proved useful for many graph algorithms. However, this model hides the partitioning information from the users, thus prevents many algorithm-specific optimizations. This often results in longer execution time due to excessive network messages (e.g. in Pregel) or heavy scheduling overhead to ensure data consistency (e.g. in GraphLab). To address this limitation, we propose a new "think like a graph" programming paradigm. Under this graph-centric model, the partition structure is opened up to the users, and can be utilized so that communication within a partition can bypass the heavy message passing or scheduling machinery. We implemented this model in a new system, called Giraph++, based on Apache Giraph, an open source implementation of Pregel. We explore the applicability of the graph-centric model to three categories of graph algorithms, and demonstrate its flexibility and superior performance, especially on well-partitioned data. For example, on a web graph with 118 million vertices and 855 million edges, the graph-centric version of connected component detection algorithm runs 63X faster and uses 204X fewer network messages than its vertex-centric counterpart.