Scalable Analytics over Distributed Time-series Graphs using GoFFish

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

Polystore++: Accelerated Polystore System for Heterogeneous Workloads

Modern real-time business analytic consist of heterogeneous workloads (e.g, database queries, graph processing, and machine learning). These analytic applications need programming environments that can capture all aspects of the constituent workloads (including data models they work on and movement of data across processing engines). Polystore systems suit such applications; however, these systems currently execute on CPUs and the slowdown of Moore's Law means they cannot meet the performance and efficiency requirements of modern workloads. We envision Polystore++, an architecture to accelerate existing polystore systems using hardware accelerators (e.g, FPGAs, CGRAs, and GPUs). Polystore++ systems can achieve high performance at low power by identifying and offloading components of a polystore system that are amenable to acceleration using specialized hardware. Building a Polystore++ system is challenging and introduces new research problems motivated by the use of hardware accelerators (e.g, optimizing and mapping query plans across heterogeneous computing units and exploiting hardware pipelining and parallelism to improve performance). In this paper, we discuss these challenges in detail and list possible approaches to address these problems.Comment: 11 pages, Accepted in ICDCS 201

A Microbenchmark Characterization of the Emu Chick

The Emu Chick is a prototype system designed around the concept of migratory memory-side processing. Rather than transferring large amounts of data across power-hungry, high-latency interconnects, the Emu Chick moves lightweight thread contexts to near-memory cores before the beginning of each memory read. The current prototype hardware uses FPGAs to implement cache-less "Gossamer cores for doing computational work and a stationary core to run basic operating system functions and migrate threads between nodes. In this multi-node characterization of the Emu Chick, we extend an earlier single-node investigation (Hein, et al. AsHES 2018) of the the memory bandwidth characteristics of the system through benchmarks like STREAM, pointer chasing, and sparse matrix-vector multiplication. We compare the Emu Chick hardware to architectural simulation and an Intel Xeon-based platform. Our results demonstrate that for many basic operations the Emu Chick can use available memory bandwidth more efficiently than a more traditional, cache-based architecture although bandwidth usage suffers for computationally intensive workloads like SpMV. Moreover, the Emu Chick provides stable, predictable performance with up to 65% of the peak bandwidth utilization on a random-access pointer chasing benchmark with weak locality

MESH: A Flexible Distributed Hypergraph Processing System

With the rapid growth of large online social networks, the ability to analyze large-scale social structure and behavior has become critically important, and this has led to the development of several scalable graph processing systems. In reality, however, social interaction takes place not only between pairs of individuals as in the graph model, but rather in the context of multi-user groups. Research has shown that such group dynamics can be better modeled through a more general hypergraph model, resulting in the need to build scalable hypergraph processing systems. In this paper, we present MESH, a flexible distributed framework for scalable hypergraph processing. MESH provides an easy-to-use and expressive application programming interface that naturally extends the think like a vertex model common to many popular graph processing systems. Our framework provides a flexible implementation based on an underlying graph processing system, and enables different design choices for the key implementation issues of partitioning a hypergraph representation. We implement MESH on top of the popular GraphX graph processing framework in Apache Spark. Using a variety of real datasets and experiments conducted on a local 8-node cluster as well as a 65-node Amazon AWS testbed, we demonstrate that MESH provides flexibility based on data and application characteristics, as well as scalability with cluster size. We further show that it is competitive in performance to HyperX, another hypergraph processing system based on Spark, while providing a much simpler implementation (requiring about 5X fewer lines of code), thus showing that simplicity and flexibility need not come at the cost of performance.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E

Scaling-Up Reasoning and Advanced Analytics on BigData

BigDatalog is an extension of Datalog that achieves performance and scalability on both Apache Spark and multicore systems to the point that its graph analytics outperform those written in GraphX. Looking back, we see how this realizes the ambitious goal pursued by deductive database researchers beginning forty years ago: this is the goal of combining the rigor and power of logic in expressing queries and reasoning with the performance and scalability by which relational databases managed Big Data. This goal led to Datalog which is based on Horn Clauses like Prolog but employs implementation techniques, such as Semi-naive Fixpoint and Magic Sets, that extend the bottom-up computation model of relational systems, and thus obtain the performance and scalability that relational systems had achieved, as far back as the 80s, using data-parallelization on shared-nothing architectures. But this goal proved difficult to achieve because of major issues at (i) the language level and (ii) at the system level. The paper describes how (i) was addressed by simple rules under which the fixpoint semantics extends to programs using count, sum and extrema in recursion, and (ii) was tamed by parallel compilation techniques that achieve scalability on multicore systems and Apache Spark. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

Accelerating PageRank using Partition-Centric Processing

PageRank is a fundamental link analysis algorithm that also functions as a key representative of the performance of Sparse Matrix-Vector (SpMV) multiplication. The traditional PageRank implementation generates fine granularity random memory accesses resulting in large amount of wasteful DRAM traffic and poor bandwidth utilization. In this paper, we present a novel Partition-Centric Processing Methodology (PCPM) to compute PageRank, that drastically reduces the amount of DRAM communication while achieving high sustained memory bandwidth. PCPM uses a Partition-centric abstraction coupled with the Gather-Apply-Scatter (GAS) programming model. By carefully examining how a PCPM based implementation impacts communication characteristics of the algorithm, we propose several system optimizations that improve the execution time substantially. More specifically, we develop (1) a new data layout that significantly reduces communication and random DRAM accesses, and (2) branch avoidance mechanisms to get rid of unpredictable data-dependent branches. We perform detailed analytical and experimental evaluation of our approach using 6 large graphs and demonstrate an average 2.7x speedup in execution time and 1.7x reduction in communication volume, compared to the state-of-the-art. We also show that unlike other GAS based implementations, PCPM is able to further reduce main memory traffic by taking advantage of intelligent node labeling that enhances locality. Although we use PageRank as the target application in this paper, our approach can be applied to generic SpMV computation.Comment: Added acknowledgments. In proceedings of USENIX ATC 201

A Collaborative Untethered Virtual Reality Environment for Interactive Social Network Visualization

The increasing prevalence of Virtual Reality technologies as a platform for gaming and video playback warrants research into how to best apply the current state of the art to challenges in data visualization. Many current VR systems are noncollaborative, while data analysis and visualization is often a multi-person process. Our goal in this paper is to address the technical and user experience challenges that arise when creating VR environments for collaborative data visualization. We focus on the integration of multiple tracking systems and the new interaction paradigms that this integration can enable, along with visual design considerations that apply specifically to collaborative network visualization in virtual reality. We demonstrate a system for collaborative interaction with large 3D layouts of Twitter friend/follow networks. The system is built by combining a 'Holojam' architecture (multiple GearVR Headsets within an OptiTrack motion capture stage) and Perception Neuron motion suits, to offer an untethered, full-room multi-person visualization experience

Empowering In-Memory Relational Database Engines with Native Graph Processing

The plethora of graphs and relational data give rise to many interesting graph-relational queries in various domains, e.g., finding related proteins satisfying relational predicates in a biological network. The maturity of RDBMSs motivated academia and industry to invest efforts in leveraging RDBMSs for graph processing, where efficiency is proven for vital graph queries. However, none of these efforts process graphs natively inside the RDBMS, which is particularly challenging due to the impedance mismatch between the relational and the graph models. In this paper, we propose to treat graphs as first-class citizens inside the relational engine so that operations on graphs are executed natively inside the RDBMS. We realize our approach inside VoltDB, an open-source in-memory relational database, and name this realization GRFusion. The SQL and the query engine of GRFusion are empowered to declaratively define graphs and execute cross-data-model query plans formed by graph and relational operators, resulting in up to four orders-of-magnitude in query-time speedup w.r.t. state-of-the-art approaches

A New Frontier for Pull-Based Graph Processing

The trade-off between pull-based and push-based graph processing engines is well-understood. On one hand, pull-based engines can achieve higher throughput because their workloads are read-dominant, rather than write-dominant, and can proceed without synchronization between threads. On the other hand, push-based engines are much better able to take advantage of the frontier optimization, which leverages the fact that often only a small subset of the graph needs to be accessed to complete an iteration of a graph processing application. Hybrid engines attempt to overcome this trade-off by dynamically switching between push and pull, but there are two key disadvantages with this approach. First, applications must be implemented twice (once for push and once for pull), and second, processing throughput is reduced for iterations that run with push. We propose a radically different solution: rebuild the frontier optimization entirely such that it is well-suited for a pull-based engine. In doing so, we remove the only advantage that a push-based engine had over a pull-based engine, making it possible to eliminate the push-based engine entirely. We introduce Wedge, a pull-only graph processing framework that transforms the traditional source-oriented vertex-based frontier into a pull-friendly format called the Wedge Frontier. The transformation itself is expensive even when parallelized, so we introduce two key optimizations to make it practical. First, we perform the transformation only when the resulting Wedge Frontier is sufficiently sparse. Second, we coarsen the granularity of the representation of elements in the Wedge Frontier. These optimizations respectively improve Wedge's performance by up to 5x and 2x, enabling it to outperform Grazelle, Ligra, and GraphMat respectively by up to 2.8x, 4.9x, and 185.5x

Asynchronous Complex Analytics in a Distributed Dataflow Architecture

Scalable distributed dataflow systems have recently experienced widespread adoption, with commodity dataflow engines such as Hadoop and Spark, and even commodity SQL engines routinely supporting increasingly sophisticated analytics tasks (e.g., support vector machines, logistic regression, collaborative filtering). However, these systems' synchronous (often Bulk Synchronous Parallel) dataflow execution model is at odds with an increasingly important trend in the machine learning community: the use of asynchrony via shared, mutable state (i.e., data races) in convex programming tasks, which has---in a single-node context---delivered noteworthy empirical performance gains and inspired new research into asynchronous algorithms. In this work, we attempt to bridge this gap by evaluating the use of lightweight, asynchronous state transfer within a commodity dataflow engine. Specifically, we investigate the use of asynchronous sideways information passing (ASIP) that presents single-stage parallel iterators with a Volcano-like intra-operator iterator that can be used for asynchronous information passing. We port two synchronous convex programming algorithms, stochastic gradient descent and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), to use ASIPs. We evaluate an implementation of ASIPs within on Apache Spark that exhibits considerable speedups as well as a rich set of performance trade-offs in the use of these asynchronous algorithms