Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that theoretically-efficient parallel graph algorithms can be implemented to process large real-world graphs on a single machine with terabyte RAM in minutes, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces scalable, theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for 20 graph problems, optimized for large in-memory graphs, with publicly available implementations.

Findings

Algorithms process large graphs in minutes

Outperform existing state-of-the-art implementations

First solutions for many problems at this scale

Abstract

There has been significant recent interest in parallel graph processing due to the need to quickly analyze the large graphs available today. Many graph codes have been designed for distributed memory or external memory. However, today even the largest publicly-available real-world graph (the Hyperlink Web graph with over 3.5 billion vertices and 128 billion edges) can fit in the memory of a single commodity multicore server. Nevertheless, most experimental work in the literature report results on much smaller graphs, and the ones for the Hyperlink graph use distributed or external memory. Therefore, it is natural to ask whether we can efficiently solve a broad class of graph problems on this graph in memory. This paper shows that theoretically-efficient parallel graph algorithms can scale to the largest publicly-available graphs using a single machine with a terabyte of RAM, processing them in minutes. We give implementations of theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for 20 important graph problems. We also present the optimizations and techniques that we used in our implementations, which were crucial in enabling us to process these large graphs quickly. We show that the running times of our implementations outperform existing state-of-the-art implementations on the largest real-world graphs. For many of the problems that we consider, this is the first time they have been solved on graphs at this scale. We have made the implementations developed in this work publicly-available as the Graph-Based Benchmark Suite (GBBS).