Achieving Optimal Inter-Node Communication in Graph Partitioning Using Random Selection and Breadth-First Search

Processing large graph datasets represents an increasingly important area in computing research and applications. The size of many graph datasets has increased well beyond the processing capacity of a single computing node, thereby necessitating distributed approaches. As these datasets are processed over a distributed system of nodes, this leads to an inter-node communication cost problem that negatively affects system performance. Previously proposed algorithms implemented breadth-first search (BFS) for graph searching and focused on the execution, parallel performance and not the communication. In this paper a new methodology is proposed that combines BFS with random selection in order to partition large graph datasets and effectively minimize inter-node communication. The new method is discussed and applied to the single-source shortest path and PageRank algorithms using three graphs that are representative of real-world scenarios. Experimental results show that graph inter-node communication for canonical graphs representative of real-world data is improved up to 42 % in case of Powerlaw graph, up to 27 % in case of Random near K-regular graph (with low degree), and up to 7 % in case of Random near K-regular graph (with high degree).