GraphX: Unifying Data-Parallel and Graph-Parallel Analytics

From social networks to language modeling, the growing scale and importance of graph data has driven the development of numerous new graph-parallel systems (e.g., Pregel, GraphLab). By restricting the computation that can be expressed and introducing new techniques to partition and distribute the graph, these systems can efficiently execute iterative graph algorithms orders of magnitude faster than more general data-parallel systems. However, the same restrictions that enable the performance gains also make it difficult to express many of the important stages in a typical graph-analytics pipeline: constructing the graph, modifying its structure, or expressing computation that spans multiple graphs. As a consequence, existing graph analytics pipelines compose graph-parallel and data-parallel systems using external storage systems, leading to extensive data movement and complicated programming model. To address these challenges we introduce GraphX, a distributed graph computation framework that unifies graph-parallel and data-parallel computation. GraphX provides a small, core set of graph-parallel operators expressive enough to implement the Pregel and PowerGraph abstractions, yet simple enough to be cast in relational algebra. GraphX uses a collection of query optimization techniques such as automatic join rewrites to efficiently implement these graph-parallel operators. We evaluate GraphX on real-world graphs and workloads and demonstrate that GraphX achieves comparable performance as specialized graph computation systems, while outperforming them in end-to-end graph pipelines. Moreover, GraphX achieves a balance between expressiveness, performance, and ease of use

Distributed Processing of Generalized Graph-Pattern Queries in SPARQL 1.1

We propose an efficient and scalable architecture for processing generalized graph-pattern queries as they are specified by the current W3C recommendation of the SPARQL 1.1 "Query Language" component. Specifically, the class of queries we consider consists of sets of SPARQL triple patterns with labeled property paths. From a relational perspective, this class resolves to conjunctive queries of relational joins with additional graph-reachability predicates. For the scalable, i.e., distributed, processing of this kind of queries over very large RDF collections, we develop a suitable partitioning and indexing scheme, which allows us to shard the RDF triples over an entire cluster of compute nodes and to process an incoming SPARQL query over all of the relevant graph partitions (and thus compute nodes) in parallel. Unlike most prior works in this field, we specifically aim at the unified optimization and distributed processing of queries consisting of both relational joins and graph-reachability predicates. All communication among the compute nodes is established via a proprietary, asynchronous communication protocol based on the Message Passing Interface

Provenance for SPARQL queries

Determining trust of data available in the Semantic Web is fundamental for applications and users, in particular for linked open data obtained from SPARQL endpoints. There exist several proposals in the literature to annotate SPARQL query results with values from abstract models, adapting the seminal works on provenance for annotated relational databases. We provide an approach capable of providing provenance information for a large and significant fragment of SPARQL 1.1, including for the first time the major non-monotonic constructs under multiset semantics. The approach is based on the translation of SPARQL into relational queries over annotated relations with values of the most general m-semiring, and in this way also refuting a claim in the literature that the OPTIONAL construct of SPARQL cannot be captured appropriately with the known abstract models.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the ISWC 2012 paper including proof