The wide availability of powerful and inexpensive cloud computing services
naturally motivates the study of distributed graph layout algorithms, able to
scale to very large graphs. Nowadays, to process Big Data, companies are
increasingly relying on PaaS infrastructures rather than buying and maintaining
complex and expensive hardware. So far, only a few examples of basic
force-directed algorithms that work in a distributed environment have been
described. Instead, the design of a distributed multilevel force-directed
algorithm is a much more challenging task, not yet addressed. We present the
first multilevel force-directed algorithm based on a distributed vertex-centric
paradigm, and its implementation on Giraph, a popular platform for distributed
graph algorithms. Experiments show the effectiveness and the scalability of the
approach. Using an inexpensive cloud computing service of Amazon, we draw
graphs with ten million edges in about 60 minutes.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016
