Scalable Analytics over Distributed Time-series Graphs using GoFFish

Abstract: Graphs are a key form of Big Data, and performing scalable analytics over them is invaluable to many domains. As our ability to collect data grows, there is an emerging class of inter-connected data which accumulates or varies over time, and on which novel analytics - both over the network structure and across the time-variant attribute values - is necessary. We introduce the notion of time-series graph analytics and propose Gopher, a scalable programming abstraction to develop algorithms and analytics on such datasets. Our abstraction leverages a sub-graph centric programming model and extends it to the temporal dimension using an iterative BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) approach. Gopher is co-designed with GoFS, a distributed storage specialized for time-series graphs, as part of the GoFFish distributed analytics platform. We examine storage optimizations for GoFS, design patterns in Gopher to leverage the distributed data layout, and evaluate the GoFFish platform using time-series graph data and applications on a commodity cluster.