VEBO: A Vertex- and Edge-Balanced Ordering Heuristic to Load Balance Parallel Graph Processing

Abstract

Graph partitioning drives graph processing in distributed, disk-based and NUMA-aware systems. A commonly used partitioning goal is to balance the number of edges per partition in conjunction with minimizing the edge or vertex cut. While this type of partitioning is computationally expensive, we observe that such topology-driven partitioning nonetheless results in computational load imbalance.We propose Vertex-and Edge-Balanced Ordering (VEBO): balance the number of edges and the number of unique destinations of those edges. VEBO optimally balances edges and vertices for graphs with a powerlaw degree distribution. Experimental evaluation on three shared-memory graph processing systems (Ligra, Polymer and GraphGrind) shows that VEBO achieves excellent load balance and improves performance by 1.09x over Ligra, 1.41x over Polymer and 1.65x over GraphGrind, compared to their respective partitioning algorithms, averaged across 8 algorithms and 7 graphs.

Multi-dimensional balanced graph partitioning via projected gradient descent

“…Since in Giraph (and other vertexcentric systems) the computation is split into a number of supersteps that end with a global synchronization barrier, the performance is determined by the slowest worker. Notice that a similar phenomena regarding the vertex partitioning has been observed in earlier works [3,18,20,40]. In contrast, the two-dimensional partitioning always results in a speedup over the default Hash strategy.…”

“…Good partitions according to this model typically result in better balance across workers and reduced computation time in comparison to the trivial hash-based assignment of vertices to worker machines. However, edge-based graph partitioning can still result in performance regressions [3,40].…”

“…The resulting assignment results in a 1.17x speedup over the hash-based model. Motivated by the above experiment and a number of earlier studies [3,20,40,43], we formalize a new model for graph partitioning which is suitable for real-world distributed graph processing systems.…”

Mastiff

“…VEBO [55] introduces a partitioning algorithm that distributes high-degree vertices on different partitions, while trying to assign equal number of edges to partitions.…”