DPM: A novel distributed large-scale social graph processing framework for link prediction algorithms

Large-scale graphs have become ubiquitous in social media. Computer-based recommendations in these huge graphs pose challenges in terms of algorithm design and resource usage efficiency when processing recommendations in distributed computing environments. Moreover, recommendation algorithms for graphs, particularly link prediction algorithms, have different requirements depending of the way the underlying graph is traversed. Path-based algorithms usually perform traversals in different directions to build a large ranking of vertices to recommend, whereas random walk-based algorithms build an initial subgraph and perform several iterations on those vertices to compute the final ranking. In this work, we propose a distributed graph processing framework called Distributed Partitioned Merge (DPM), which supports both types of algorithms and we compare its performance and resource usage w.r.t. two relevant frameworks, namely Fork-Join and Pregel. In our experiments, we show that in most tests DPM outperforms both Pregel and Fork-Join in terms of recommendation time, with a minor penalization in network usage in some scenarios.