NScale

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in executing rich and complex analysis tasks over large-scale graphs, many of which require processing and reasoning about a large number of multi-hop neighborhoods or subgraphs in the graph. Examples of such tasks include ego network analysis, motif counting in biological networks, finding social circles, personalized recommendations, link prediction, anomaly detection , analyzing influence cascades , and so on. These tasks are not well served by existing vertex-centric graph processing frameworks whose computation and execution models limit the user program to directly access the state of a single vertex , resulting in high communication, scheduling, and memory overheads in executing such tasks. Further, most existing graph processing frameworks also typically ignore the challenges in extracting the relevant portions of the graph that an analysis task is interested in, and loading it onto distributed memory. In this demonstration proposal, we describe NScale, a novel end-to-end graph processing framework that enables the distributed execution of complex neighborhood-centric analytics over large-scale graphs in the cloud. NScale enables users to write programs at the level of neighborhoods or subgraphs. NScale uses Apache YARN for efficient and fault-tolerant distribution of data and computation; it features GEL, a novel graph extraction and loading phase, that extracts the relevant portions of the graph and loads them into distributed memory using as few machines as possible. NScale utilizes novel techniques for the distributed execution of user computation that minimize memory consumption by exploiting overlap among the neighborhoods of interest. A comprehensive experimental evaluation shows orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and total cost over vertex-centric approaches.