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Think Sequential, Run Parallel

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Symposium on Real-Time and Hybrid Systems

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11180))

Abstract

Parallel computation is often a must when processing large-scale graphs. However, it is nontrivial to write parallel graph algorithms with correctness guarantees. This paper presents the programming model of \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\), a parallel GRAPh Engine [19]. \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\) allows users to “plug in” sequential (single-machine) graph algorithms as a whole, and it parallelizes the algorithms across a cluster of processors. In other words, it simplifies parallel programming for graph computations, from think parallel to think sequential. Under a monotonic condition, it guarantees to converge at correct answers as long as the sequential algorithms are correct. We present the foundation underlying \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\), based on simultaneous fixpoint computation. As examples, we demonstrate how \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\) parallelizes our familiar sequential graph algorithms. Furthermore, we show that in addition to its programming simplicity, \(\mathsf {GRAPE}\) achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art graph systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    \({\mathsf {GraphLab}} _{{\mathsf {sync}}}\) and \({\mathsf {GraphLab}} _{{\mathsf {async}}}\) run different modes of \(\mathsf {GraphLab}\) (PowerGraph).

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Acknowledgments

The paper is a tribute to Professor Chaochen Zhou, who took Fan as an MSc student 30 years ago, despite pressure from a powerful person, whom Fan confronted to get justice done for his late former MSc adviser. The authors are supported in part by 973 Program 2014CB340302, ERC 652976, EPSRC EP/M025268/1, NSFC 61421003, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing, Shenzhen Peacock Program 1105100030834361, and Joint Research Lab between Edinburgh and Huawei.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Wenfei Fan & Ruiqi Xu

  2. Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Wenfei Fan, Muyang Liu, Lei Hou, Dongze Li & Zizhong Meng

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  1. Wenfei Fan
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Correspondence to Wenfei Fan , Lei Hou , Dongze Li or Zizhong Meng .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

    Cliff Jones

  2. National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

    Ji Wang

  3. Institute of Software, CAS, Beijing, China

    Naijun Zhan

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Fan, W., Liu, M., Xu, R., Hou, L., Li, D., Meng, Z. (2018). Think Sequential, Run Parallel. In: Jones, C., Wang, J., Zhan, N. (eds) Symposium on Real-Time and Hybrid Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11180. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01461-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01461-2_1

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