Hybrid Pulling/Pushing for I/O-Efficient Distributed and Iterative Graph Computing

Abstract

Billion-node graphs are rapidly growing in size in many applications such as online social networks. Most graph algorithms generate a large number of messages during iterative computations. Vertex-centric distributed systems usually store graph data and message data on disk to improve scalability. Currently, these distributed systems with disk-resident data take a push-based approach to handle messages. This works well if few messages reside on disk. Otherwise, it is I/O-inefficient due to expensive random writes. By contrast, the existing memory-resident pull-based approach individually pulls messages for each vertex on demand. Although it can be used to avoid disk operations regarding messages, expensive I/O costs are incurred by random and frequent access to vertices.