Packed Compressed Sparse Row: A Dynamic Graph Representation

Abstract

Perhaps the most popular sparse graph storage format is Compressed Sparse Row (CSR). CSR excels at storing graphs compactly with minimal overhead, allowing for fast traversals, lookups, and basic graph computations such as PageRank. Since elements in CSR format are packed together, additions and deletions often require time linear in the size of the graph. We introduce a new dynamic sparse graph representation called Packed Compressed Sparse Row (PCSR), based on an array-based dynamic data structure called the Packed Memory Array. PCSR is similar to CSR, but leaves spaces between elements, allowing for asymptotically faster insertions and deletions in exchange for a constant factor slowdown in traversals and a constant factor increase in space overhead. Our contributions are twofold. We describe PCSR and review the theoretical guarantees for update, insert, and search for PCSR. We also implemented PCSR as well as other basic graph storage formats and report our findings on a variety of benchmarks. PCSR supports inserts orders of magnitude faster than CSR and is only a factor of two slower on graph traversals. Our results suggest that PCSR is a lightweight dynamic graph representation that supports fast inserts and competitive searches.