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L-PowerGraph: a lightweight distributed graph-parallel communication mechanism

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Abstract

In order to process complex and large-scale graph data, numerous distributed graph-parallel computing platforms have been proposed. PowerGraph is an excellent representative of them. It has exhibited better performance, such as faster graph-processing rate and higher scalability, than others. However, like in other distributed graph computing systems, unnecessary and excessive communications among computing nodes in PowerGraph not only aggravate the network I/O workload of the underlying computing hardware systems but may also cause a decrease in runtime performance. In this paper, we propose and implement a mechanism called L-PowerGraph, which reduces the communication overhead in PowerGraph. First, L-PowerGraph identifies and eliminates the avoidable communications in PowerGraph. Second, in order to further reduce the required communications L-PowerGraph proposes an edge direction-aware master appointment strategy, in which L-PowerGraph appoints the replica with both incoming and outgoing edges as master. Third, L-PowerGraph proposes an edge direction-aware graph partition strategy, which optimally isolates the outgoing edges from the incoming edges of a vertex during the graph partition process. We have conducted extensive experiments using real-world datasets, and our results verified the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism. For example, compared with PowerGraph under Random partition scenario L-PowerGraph can not only reduce up to 30.5% of the communication overhead but also cut up to 20.3% of the runtime for PageRank algorithm while processing Live-journal dataset. The performance improvement achieved by L-PowerGraph over our precursor work, LightGraph, which only reduces the synchronizing communication overhead, is also verified by our experimental results.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CRI CNS-0855248, and Grant MRI CNS-0619069.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Epithelial Systems Biology Laboratory, National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA

    Yue Zhao

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, USA

    Kenji Yoshigoe & Mengjun Xie

  3. Health Outcomes and Policy, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Jiang Bian

  4. School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

    Ke Xiong

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Correspondence to Yue Zhao.

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Zhao, Y., Yoshigoe, K., Xie, M. et al. L-PowerGraph: a lightweight distributed graph-parallel communication mechanism. J Supercomput 76, 1850–1879 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2359-9

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