Distributed Graph Layout for Scalable Small-world Network Analysis

Abstract: The in-memory graph layout or organization has a considerable impact on the time and energy efficiency of distributed memory graph computations. It affects memory locality, inter-task load balance, communication time, and overall memory utilization. Graph layout could refer to partitioning or replication of vertex and edge arrays, selective replication of data structures that hold meta-data, and reordering vertex and edge identifiers. In this work, we present DGL, a fast, parallel, and memory-efficient distributed graph layout strategy that is specifically designed for small-world networks (low-diameter graphs with skewed vertex degree distributions). Label propagation-based partitioning and a scalable BFS-based ordering are the main steps in the layout strategy. We show that the DGL layout can significantly improve end-to-end performance of five challenging graph analytics workloads: PageRank, a parallel subgraph enumeration program, tuned implementations of breadth-first search and single-source shortest paths, and RDF3X-MPI, a distributed SPARQL query processing engine. Using these benchmarks, we additionally offer a comprehensive analysis on how graph layout affects the performance of graph analytics with variable computation and communication characteristics.