A Distributed Algorithm for Force Directed Edge Bundling

Existing edge bundling algorithms typically require the global information structure of a graph. Therefore, with a simple division of the edges of a graph, it is challenging to conduct edge bundling in a distributed environment and achieve scalable performance. We select a representative edge bundling algorithm, Force-Directed Edge Bundling (FDEB), and parallelize it in a distributed environment. Particularly, to address the difficulties of partitioning and distributions of a large graph among processors, we first create a high dimensional space to represent the data distribution of a graph in FDEB. Second, we map each edge as a data point in this high dimensional space, and then partition and distribute the point cloud among processors. In this way, we can significantly reduce the data communication across processors, and ensure each processor assigned with a similar workload.