High Performance Graph Processing with Locality Oriented Design

Many distributed graph processing frameworks have emerged for helping doing large scale data analysis for many applications including social network and data mining. The existing frameworks usually focus on the system scalability without consideration of local computing performance. We have observed two locality issues which greatly influence the local computing performance in existing systems. One is the locality of the data associated with each vertex/edge. The data are often considered as a logical undividable unit and put into continuous memory. However, it is quite common that for some computing steps, only some portions of data (called as some properties) are needed. The current data layout incurs large amount of interleaved memory access. The other issue is their execution engine applies computation at a granularity of vertex. Making optimization for the locality of source vertex of each edge will often hurt the locality of target vertex or vice versa. We have built a distributed graph processing framework called Photon to address the above issues. Photon employs Property View to store the same type of property for all vertices and edges together. This will improve the locality while doing computation with a portion of properties. Photon also employs an edge-centric execution engine with Hilbert-Order that improve the locality during computation. We have evaluated Photon with five graph applications using five real-world graphs and compared it with four existing systems. The results show that Property View and edge-centric execution design improve graph processing by 2.4X.