Parallel processing of large graphs

More and more large data collections are gathered worldwide in various IT systems. Many of them possess a networked nature and need to be processed and analysed as graph structures. Due to their size they very often require the usage of a parallel paradigm for efficient computation. Three parallel techniques have been compared in the paper: MapReduce, its map-side join extension and Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP). They are implemented for two different graph problems: calculation of single source shortest paths (SSSP) and collective classification of graph nodes by means of relational influence propagation (RIP). The methods and algorithms are applied to several network datasets differing in size and structural profile, originating from three domains: telecommunication, multimedia and microblog. The results revealed that iterative graph processing with the BSP implementation always and significantly, even up to 10 times outperforms MapReduce, especially for algorithms with many iterations and sparse communication. The extension of MapReduce based on map-side join is usually characterized by better efficiency compared to its origin, although not as much as BSP. Nevertheless, MapReduce still remains a good alternative for enormous networks, whose data structures do not fit in local memories.