A Hybrid Update Strategy for I/O-Efficient Out-of-Core Graph Processing

In recent years, a number of out-of-core graph processing systems have been proposed to process graphs with billions of edges on just one commodity computer, due to their high cost efficiency. To obtain a better performance, these systems adopt a full I/O model that scans all edges during the computation to avoid the inefficiency of random I/Os. Although this model ensures good I/O access locality, it leads to a large number of useless edges to be loaded when running graph algorithms that only access a small portion of edges in each iteration. An intuitive method to solve this I/O inefficiency problem is the on-demand I/O model that only accesses the active edges. However, this method only works well for the graph algorithms with very few active edges, since the I/O cost will grow rapidly as the number of active edges increases due to the increasing amount of random I/Os. In this article, we present HUS-Graph, an efficient out-of-core graph processing system to address the above I/O issues and achieve a good balance between I/O traffic and I/O access locality. HUS-Graph adopts a hybrid update strategy including two update models, Row-oriented Push (ROP) and Column-oriented Pull (COP). It supports switching between ROP and COP adaptively, for the graph algorithms that have different computation and I/O features. For traversal-based algorithms, HUS-Graph also provides an immediate propagation-based vertex update scheme to accelerate the vertex state propagation and convergence speed. Furthermore, HUS-Graph adopts a locality-optimized dual-block representation to organize graph data and an I/O-based performance prediction method to enable the system to dynamically select the optimal update model between ROP and COP. To save the disk space and further reduce I/O traffic, HUS-Graph implements a space-efficient storage format by combining several graph compression methods. Extensive experimental results show that HUS-Graph outperforms two existing out-of-core systems GraphChi and GridGraph by 1.2x-52.8x.