A Local Approximation Approach for Processing Time-Evolving Graphs

To efficiently process time-evolving graphs where new vertices and edges are inserted over time, an incremental computing model, which processes the newly-constructed graph based on the results of the computation on the outdated graph, is widely adopted in distributed time-evolving graph computing systems. In this paper, we first experimentally study how the results of the graph computation on the local graph structure can approximate the results of the graph computation on the complete graph structure in distributed environments. Then, we develop an optimization approach to reduce the response time in bulk synchronous parallel (BSP)-based incremental computing systems by processing time-evolving graphs on the local graph structure instead of on the complete graph structure. We have evaluated our optimization approach using the graph algorithms single-source shortest path (SSSP) and PageRankon the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2), a central part of Amazon.com’s cloud-computing platform, with different scales of graph datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the local approximation approach can reduce the response time for the SSSP algorithm by 22% and reduce the response time for the PageRank algorithm by 7% on average compared to the existing incremental computing framework of GraphTau