Streaming Hypergraph Partitioning Algorithms on Limited Memory Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces efficient streaming hypergraph partitioning algorithms suitable for limited-memory environments, significantly improving runtime and enabling better partition quality in edge computing scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a modified version of a known streaming algorithm with drastically reduced runtime and proposes new sketch- and hash-based algorithms that leverage extra memory for improved partitioning.

Findings

New algorithm reduces runtime from 17800s to 10s on medium-scale hypergraphs.

Proposed algorithms perform well on various hardware architectures.

Memory-aware algorithms improve partition quality in streaming hypergraph scenarios.

Abstract

Many well-known, real-world problems involve dynamic data which describe the relationship among the entities. Hypergraphs are powerful combinatorial structures that are frequently used to model such data. For many of today's data-centric applications, this data is streaming; new items arrive continuously, and the data grows with time. With paradigms such as Internet of Things and Edge Computing, such applications become more natural and more practical. In this work, we assume a streaming model where the data is modeled as a hypergraph, which is generated at the edge. This data then partitioned and sent to remote nodes via an algorithm running on a memory-restricted device such as a single board computer. Such a partitioning is usually performed by taking a connectivity metric into account to minimize the communication cost of later analyses that will be performed in a distributed fashion. Although there are many offline tools that can partition static hypergraphs excellently, algorithms for the streaming settings are rare. We analyze a well-known algorithm from the literature and significantly improve its running time by altering its inner data structure. For instance, on a medium-scale hypergraph, the new algorithm reduces the runtime from 17800 seconds to 10 seconds. We then propose sketch- and hash-based algorithms, as well as ones that can leverage extra memory to store a small portion of the data to enable the refinement of partitioning when possible. We experimentally analyze the performance of these algorithms and report their run times, connectivity metric scores, and memory uses on a high-end server and four different single-board computer architectures.