4,628 research outputs found
Parallel Processing of Large Graphs
More and more large data collections are gathered worldwide in various IT
systems. Many of them possess the networked nature and need to be processed and
analysed as graph structures. Due to their size they require very often usage
of parallel paradigm for efficient computation. Three parallel techniques have
been compared in the paper: MapReduce, its map-side join extension and Bulk
Synchronous Parallel (BSP). They are implemented for two different graph
problems: calculation of single source shortest paths (SSSP) and collective
classification of graph nodes by means of relational influence propagation
(RIP). The methods and algorithms are applied to several network datasets
differing in size and structural profile, originating from three domains:
telecommunication, multimedia and microblog. The results revealed that
iterative graph processing with the BSP implementation always and
significantly, even up to 10 times outperforms MapReduce, especially for
algorithms with many iterations and sparse communication. Also MapReduce
extension based on map-side join usually noticeably presents better efficiency,
although not as much as BSP. Nevertheless, MapReduce still remains the good
alternative for enormous networks, whose data structures do not fit in local
memories.Comment: Preprint submitted to Future Generation Computer System
GraphLab: A New Framework for Parallel Machine Learning
Designing and implementing efficient, provably correct parallel machine
learning (ML) algorithms is challenging. Existing high-level parallel
abstractions like MapReduce are insufficiently expressive while low-level tools
like MPI and Pthreads leave ML experts repeatedly solving the same design
challenges. By targeting common patterns in ML, we developed GraphLab, which
improves upon abstractions like MapReduce by compactly expressing asynchronous
iterative algorithms with sparse computational dependencies while ensuring data
consistency and achieving a high degree of parallel performance. We demonstrate
the expressiveness of the GraphLab framework by designing and implementing
parallel versions of belief propagation, Gibbs sampling, Co-EM, Lasso and
Compressed Sensing. We show that using GraphLab we can achieve excellent
parallel performance on large scale real-world problems
MapReduce is Good Enough? If All You Have is a Hammer, Throw Away Everything That's Not a Nail!
Hadoop is currently the large-scale data analysis "hammer" of choice, but
there exist classes of algorithms that aren't "nails", in the sense that they
are not particularly amenable to the MapReduce programming model. To address
this, researchers have proposed MapReduce extensions or alternative programming
models in which these algorithms can be elegantly expressed. This essay
espouses a very different position: that MapReduce is "good enough", and that
instead of trying to invent screwdrivers, we should simply get rid of
everything that's not a nail. To be more specific, much discussion in the
literature surrounds the fact that iterative algorithms are a poor fit for
MapReduce: the simple solution is to find alternative non-iterative algorithms
that solve the same problem. This essay captures my personal experiences as an
academic researcher as well as a software engineer in a "real-world" production
analytics environment. From this combined perspective I reflect on the current
state and future of "big data" research
Comparing MapReduce and pipeline implementations for counting triangles
A common method to define a parallel solution for a computational problem consists in finding a way to use the Divide and Conquer paradigm in order to have processors acting on its own data and scheduled in a parallel fashion. MapReduce is a programming model that follows this paradigm, and allows for the definition of efficient solutions by both decomposing a problem into steps on subsets of the input data and combining the results of each step to produce final results. Albeit used for the implementation of a wide variety of computational problems, MapReduce performance can be negatively affected whenever the replication factor grows or the size of the input is larger than the resources available at each processor. In this paper we show an alternative approach to implement the Divide and Conquer paradigm, named dynamic pipeline. The main features of dynamic pipelines are illustrated on a parallel implementation of the well-known problem of counting triangles in a graph. This problem is especially interesting either when the input graph does not fit in memory or is dynamically generated. To evaluate the properties of pipeline, a dynamic pipeline of processes and an ad-hoc version of MapReduce are implemented in the language Go, exploiting its ability to deal with channels and spawned processes. An empirical evaluation is conducted on graphs of different topologies, sizes, and densities. Observed results suggest that dynamic pipelines allows for an efficient implementation of the problem of counting triangles in a graph, particularly, in dense and large graphs, drastically reducing the execution time with respect to the MapReduce implementation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
On the Evaluation of RDF Distribution Algorithms Implemented over Apache Spark
Querying very large RDF data sets in an efficient manner requires a
sophisticated distribution strategy. Several innovative solutions have recently
been proposed for optimizing data distribution with predefined query workloads.
This paper presents an in-depth analysis and experimental comparison of five
representative and complementary distribution approaches. For achieving fair
experimental results, we are using Apache Spark as a common parallel computing
framework by rewriting the concerned algorithms using the Spark API. Spark
provides guarantees in terms of fault tolerance, high availability and
scalability which are essential in such systems. Our different implementations
aim to highlight the fundamental implementation-independent characteristics of
each approach in terms of data preparation, load balancing, data replication
and to some extent to query answering cost and performance. The presented
measures are obtained by testing each system on one synthetic and one
real-world data set over query workloads with differing characteristics and
different partitioning constraints.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure
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