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Distance labeling: on parallelism, compression, and ordering

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Abstract

Distance labeling approaches are widely adopted to speed up the online performance of shortest-distance queries. The construction of the distance labeling, however, can be exhaustive, especially on big graphs. For a major category of large graphs, small-world networks, the state-of-the-art approach is pruned landmark labeling (\(\mathsf {PLL}\)). \({\mathsf {PLL}} \) prunes distance labels based on a node order and directly constructs the pruned labels by performing breadth-first searches in the node order. The pruning technique, as well as the index construction, has a strong sequential nature which hinders \({\mathsf {PLL}} \) from being parallelized. It becomes an urgent issue on massive small-world networks whose index can hardly be constructed by a single thread within a reasonable time. This paper first scales distance labeling on small-world networks by proposing a parallel shortest-distance labeling (\(\mathsf {PSL}\)) scheme. \(\mathsf {PSL}\) insightfully converts the \({\mathsf {PLL}} \)’s node-order dependency to a shortest-distance dependence, which leads to a propagation-based parallel labeling in D rounds where D denotes the diameter of the graph. To further scale up \(\mathsf {PSL}\), it is critical to reduce the index size. This paper proposes effective index compression techniques based on graph properties as well as label properties; it also explores best practices in using betweenness-based node order to reduce the index size. The efficient betweenness estimation of the graph nodes proposed may be of independent interest to graph practitioners. Extensive experimental results verify our efficiency on billion-scale graphs, near-linear speedup in a multi-core environment, and up to \(94\%\) reduction in the index size.

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Notes

  1. In many labeling approaches, the labels are pruned in an implicit way—a label will not be generated if pruning it is guaranteed to be safe.

  2. The centrality can be defined with degree, closeness, and betweenness [31].

  3. http://networkrepository.com/index.php.

  4. http://law.di.unimi.it.

  5. For the convenience of presentation, we replace an edge (uv) of length 2 with two unit-weighted edges (uw), (wv) with a new node w interpolated in between.

  6. http://networkrepository.com/index.php.

  7. http://snap.stanford.edu/data/.

  8. http://law.di.unimi.it.

  9. http://konect.uni-koblenz.de/.

  10. We chose ABRA for two reasons. First, as pointed out in [38], ABRA outperforms the method of [37]. Second, ABRA can be terminated at any time during execution, which leads to a fair comparison with our method. The source code of ABRA is also the code used in the literature [6] and has been implemented in parallel with OpenMP.

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Acknowledgements

Miao Qiao is supported by Marsden Fund UOA1732, Royal Society of New Zealand and Catalyst: Strategic Fund 3721519 from Government Funding, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. Lu Qin is supported by ARC FT200100787 and DP210101347. Ying Zhang is supported by ARC DP180103096 and FT170100128. Lijun Chang is supported by ARC DP160101513 and FT180100256. Xuemin Lin is supported by NSFC61232006, 2018YFB1003504, ARC DP200101338, DP180103096, and DP170101628.

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Appendices

A Proof of Lemma 1

According to triangle inequality, for any node \(u \in V\), \(\mathrm{dist}(s,u) + \mathrm{dist}(u,t) \ge \mathrm{dist}(s,t)\). For a node \(u'\) on a shortest path from s to t, \(\mathrm{dist}(s,t) = \mathrm{dist}(s,u') + \mathrm{dist}(u',t)\). Since \(C(s) \cap C(t)\) shares a node with a shortest path from s to t, \(\min _{v\in C(s) \cap C(t)}\mathrm{dist}(s,v) + \mathrm{dist}(v,t) = \mathrm{dist}(s,t)\).

B Extend \({\mathsf {PSL}} \) to directed graphs

For directed graphs, each node \(v \in V\) is associated with a set of hub nodes \(C_{{\mathsf {IN}}}(v)\), where \(w \in C_{{\mathsf {IN}}}(v)\) can reach v and another set of hub nodes \(C_{{\mathsf {OUT}}}(v)\), where v can reach \(w \in C_{{\mathsf {OUT}}}(v)\). Combined with the distance, we obtain two labels \(L_{{\mathsf {IN}}}(v) = \{(u,\mathrm{dist}(u,v))|u \in C_{{\mathsf {IN}}}(v)\}\) and \(L_{{\mathsf {OUT}}}(v) = \{(u,\mathrm{dist}(v,u))|u \in C_{{\mathsf {OUT}}}(v)\}\) for the node v. To compute the labels \(L_{{\mathsf {OUT}}}(v)\), we run \({\mathsf {PSL}} \) on G; to compute \(L_{{\mathsf {IN}}}(v)\), we reverse the edge direction of graph and run \({\mathsf {PSL}} \) on the reversed graph. To process the distance query q(st), we make use of \(\mathrm{Query}(s,t,L)\) defined in the following equation.

$$\begin{aligned} \mathrm{Query}(s,t,L) = \mathrm{min}_{u \in C_{{\mathsf {OUT}}}(s) \cap C_{{\mathsf {IN}}}(t)} (\mathrm{dist}(s,u) + \mathrm{dist}(u,t)). \end{aligned}$$

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Li, W., Qiao, M., Qin, L. et al. Distance labeling: on parallelism, compression, and ordering. The VLDB Journal 31, 129–155 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-021-00694-1

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