VEBO: a vertex- and edge-balanced ordering heuristic to load balance parallel graph processing (Poster)

https://doi.org/10.1145/3293883.3295703

This work proposes Vertex- and Edge-Balanced Ordering (VEBO): balance the number of edges and the number of unique destinations of those edges. VEBO balances edges and vertices for graphs with a power-law degree distribution, and ensures an equal degree distribution between partitions. Experimental evaluation on three shared-memory graph processing systems (Ligra, Polymer and GraphGrind) shows that VEBO achieves excellent load balance and improves performance by 1.09× over Ligra, 1.41× over Polymer and 1.65× over GraphGrind, compared to their respective partitioning algorithms, averaged across 8 algorithms and 7 graphs. VEBO improves GraphGrind performance with a speedup of 2.9× over Ligra on average.

VEBO: A Vertex- and Edge-Balanced Ordering Heuristic to Load Balance Parallel Graph Processing

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06576

Graph partitioning drives graph processing in distributed, disk-based and NUMA-aware systems. A commonly used partitioning goal is to balance the number of edges per partition in conjunction with minimizing the edge or vertex cut. While this type of partitioning is computationally expensive, we observe that such topology-driven partitioning nonetheless results in computational load imbalance. We propose Vertex- and Edge-Balanced Ordering (VEBO): balance the number of edges and the number of unique destinations of those edges. VEBO optimally balances edges and vertices for graphs with a power-law degree distribution. Experimental evaluation on three shared-memory graph processing systems (Ligra, Polymer and GraphGrind) shows that VEBO achieves excellent load balance and improves performance by 1.09x over Ligra, 1.41x over Polymer and 1.65x over GraphGrind, compared to their respective partitioning algorithms, averaged across 8 algorithms and 7 graphs.

Accelerating Graph Analytics by Utilising the Memory Locality of Graph Partitioning

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPP.2017.27

This paper investigates how to improve the memory locality of graph-structured analytics on large-scale shared memory systems. We demonstrate that a graph partitioning where all in-edges for a vertex are placed in the same partition improves memory locality. However, realising performance improvement through such graph partitioning poses several challenges and requires rethinking the classification of graph algorithms and preferred data structures. We introduce the notion of medium dense frontiers, a type of frontier that is sufficiently dense for a bitmap representation, yet benefits from an indexed graph layout. Using three types of frontiers, and three graph layout schemes optimized to each frontier type, we design an edge traversal algorithm that autonomously decides which type to use. The distinction of forward vs. backward graph traversal folds into this decision and need no longer be specified by the programmer.We have implemented our techniques in a NUMA-aware graph analytics framework derived from Ligra and demonstrate a speedup of up to 4.34× over Ligra and up to 2.93× over Polymer.

GraphGrind: Addressing Load Imbalance of Graph Partitioning

https://doi.org/10.1145/3079079.3079097

We investigate how graph partitioning adversely affects the performance of graph analytics. We demonstrate that graph partitioning induces extra work during graph traversal and that graph partitions have markedly different connectivity than the original graph. By consequence, increasing the number of partitions reaches a tipping point after which overheads quickly dominate performance gains. Moreover, we show that the heuristic to balance CPU load between graph partitions by balancing the number of edges is inappropriate for a range of graph analyses. However, even when it is appropriate, it is sub-optimal due to the skewed degree distribution of social networks. Based on these observations, we propose GraphGrind, a new graph analytics system that addresses the limitations incurred by graph partitioning. We moreover propose a NUMA-aware extension to the Cilk programming language and obtain a scale-free yet NUMA-aware parallel programming environment which underpins NUMA-aware scheduling in GraphGrind. We demonstrate that Graph-Grind outperforms state-of-the-art graph analytics systems for shared memory including Ligra, Polymer and Galois.