Composing Optimization Techniques for Vertex-Centric Graph Processing via Communication Channels

Abstract: Pregel's vertex-centric model allows us to implement many interesting graph algorithms, where optimization plays an important role in making it practically useful. Although many optimizations have been developed for dealing with different performance issues, it is hard to compose them together to optimize complex algorithms, where we have to deal with multiple performance issues at the same time. In this paper, we propose a new approach to composing optimizations, by making use of the \emph{channel} interface, as a replacement of Pregel's message passing and aggregator mechanism, which can better structure the communication in Pregel algorithms. We demonstrate that it is convenient to optimize a Pregel program by simply using a proper channel from the channel library or composing them to deal with multiple performance issues. We intensively evaluate the approach through many nontrivial examples. By adopting the channel interface, our system achieves an all-around performance gain for various graph algorithms. In particular, the composition of different optimizations makes the S-V algorithm 2.20x faster than the current best implementation.