(c) 2014 Georgia Tech Research Institute Released under GPL v3.0. See LICENSE for full details

GraphBench is a suite of benchmarks centered around streaming graph analytics. With the prevalence of social media and the need to process real-time network graphs, streaming dynamic graphs have become a very important application. Many solutions exist for graph-based analysis including graph databases, custom representation using formats such as compressed sparse row (CSR), or in-memory data structures such as STINGER. GraphBench derives from STINGER, which employs in-memory storage and has proven results at processing large graphs in real-time. GraphBench includes three algorithms run on four real-world inputs: breadth first search, streaming connected components, and pagerank centrality. These algorithms are highly data dependent, have unpredictable access patterns, and are unique in their microarchitecture behavior compared to other benchmark suites.

A paper detailing the microarchitecture characteristics of GraphBench is currently under review and will eventually be released here.

To build the workloads simply do

make

This will build four workloads, bfs, components, pagerank, and edge_stream. The workloads each expect a single input which is a graph edge list file. The data files are provided in the data/ directory.

• coAuthorsDBLP - Co-authorship network. Largest graph in suite
• cond-mat-2003 - Co-authorship network.
• PGPgiantcompo - PGP trust network
• ny_sandy - Twitter feed collected during Hurricane Sandy

There are two versions of each data file, one includes edge or vertex deletions and the other does not. In an edge list a deletion is noted by a - sign preceding the edge. If the second value in a deletion is a 0, then this represents a vertex deletion. If the second value is non-zero, then it is a single edge deletion.

The first three inputs were collected from the 10th annual DIMACS challenge and repurposed to represent the behavior of dynamic graphs. Ten percent of the original nodes were duplicated and injected into the permuted edge stream. At the end of the insertion, these nodes are deleted such that the remaining structure is representative of a streaming graph with insertions and deletions happening simultaneously.

The fourth input is a streaming input taken from Twitter. Batches of edges stream in, and older edges are rolled off periodically. There are two streaming phases to the ny_sandy edge list. In the first phase insertions and deletions alternate. In the second phase, a big burst of insertions is injected into the graph.

The no deletions versions of the inputs are the same graphs without any injected deletions, creating a more packed graph structure.

The no deletions version are provided as reference and are representative of static graph analysis, not dynamic graph analysis.

Below is a summary of the graph structures and statistics.

We do anticipate releasing scripts that allow generation of more versions of each of these input files with different deletion factors, and eventually there will be scripts provided to convert new data sets as GraphBench inputs.

An effective benchmark requires a test harness that allows for separation of concerns. Setup and initialization should be done efficiently during untimed portions of the code, and the region of interest should be clearly delineated. For the algorithms only the graph algorithm is timed and measured. Except for the edge_stream workload, loading of the data into the graph from the input files is untimed and should not be considered for design decisions. This ingest is done artificially and is not representative of the patterns that occur during typical streaming graph ingest.

The edge_stream workload should use the ny_sandy input with deletions only. More data inputs will be provided in future updates.

To help delineate the test harness, bench_start() and bench_end() functions calls have been placed in the appropriate locations. The body of these functions can be found in src/lib/hooks.c.

The breadth first search calculates the distance of every vertex in the graph from a given source vertex. Two auxiliary data structures are used: a distance score and a flag indicating that a vertex has been processed, both per-vertex. Two global queues are employed to track vertices currently being processed (the current frontier) and vertices about to be processed (the next frontier). At each level of the breadth first search, starting from the source, neighbors of vertices in the current frontier that have not been visited are enqueued in the next frontier and their distance is set accordingly. This process repeats until all vertices have been visited or there are no more vertices in the queue.

The breadth first search algorithm has a vertex-centric access pattern. The edge blocks of the adjacency list of a vertex are read in succession. Each vertex is processed only once and each edge block is accessed only once.

Connected components establishes a label for each vertex such that vertices with the same label are in the same component. Vertices in a component are connected, whereas vertices in different components are not connected. The Shiloach-Vishkin algorithm for connected components begins by labeling each vertex in its own component. In each iteration, all vertices adopt the smallest label of their neighbors. When the computation converges, each vertex will be labeled with the identifier of the smallest vertex in the connected component.

The connected components algorithm is edge-centric. Every edge block is accessed during each iteration until convergence. Edge blocks are accessed via a global edge block list for maximum parallelism and efficient work distribution.

PageRank centrality calculates the likelihood of arriving at a vertex via random walks about the graph. It includes a factor that accounts for random jumping in the network. Each vertex maintains its current centrality score and distributes that score evenly to all of its neighbors in each iteration until the algorithm converges. Convergence is usually reached around 100 iterations.

The PageRank centrality algorithm employs a power iteration, vertex-centric access pattern that employs a gather operation to avoid write-locking. Scores are double precision floating point and allocated per-vertex. The edge blocks of the adjacency list of a vertex are read in succession during each iteration.

Upon release of the accompanying paper on the GraphBench characteristics. The paper summary will be provided here.