Accelerating PageRank in Shared-Memory for Efficient Social Network Graph Analytics

Baofu Huang, Zhidan Liu, Kaishun Wu

Abstract: PageRank has a wide applications in online social networks and serves as an important benchmark to examine graph processing frameworks. Many efforts have been made to improve the computation efficiency of PageRank in shared-memory platforms, where a single machine can be sufficiently powerful to handle a large-scale graph. Existing methods, however, still suffer from synchronization issues and irregular memory accesses, which will deteriorate their overall performance. In this paper, we present an accelerated parallel PageRank computation approach, named APPR. By investigating the characteristics of parallel PageRank computation and degree distributions of social network graphs, APPR proposes a series of optimization techniques to improve the efficiency of PageRank computation. Specifically, a destination-centric graph partitioning scheme is designed to avoid the synchronization issues when concurrently updating the common vertex data. By exploiting power-law structure of social network graphs, APPR can intelligently schedule the computations of vertices to save computing operations. The vertex messages are adjusted by APPR for transmission to further improve the locality of memory accesses. Empirical evaluations are performed based on a set of large real-world graphs. Experimental results show that APPR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, with on average 2.4x speedup in execution time and 16.4x reduction in DRAM communication.