GraphFlow: A Fast and Accurate Distributed Streaming Graph Computation Model

Zheheng Liang, Yingying Zheng, Sheng Bi, Chaosheng Yao, Jiayan Wang, Lijie Xu, Shuping Ji, Wei Wang, Shikai Duan

Abstract: Streaming graph computation has been widely applied in many fields, e.g., social network analysis and online product recommendation. However, existing streaming graph computation approaches still present limitations on accuracy and efficiency. To improve the accuracy, some distributed systems use the sequential graph update method based on an incremental computation model. However, these systems cannot handle the dynamic graph update concurrently. The speculation-based parallel updating model can parallelize the graph computation, however, it is restricted due to ignoring the original messages when updating a graph. Streaming graph computation usually requires high accuracy and low latency. As such, it is challenging to utilize incremental computation while simultaneously supplying concurrent processing guarantees.To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we first analyze a number of classical graph algorithms and summarize three principles that graph algorithms should satisfy in streaming scenarios. Based on these principles, we propose GraphFlow, a streaming graph computation model. GraphFlow achieves fast and accurate computation by utilizing incremental state update and propagation. To reduce the impact of concurrent update conflicts, GraphFlow provides a fine-grained lock based parallel update strategy. We implement GraphFlow framework and evaluate its performance and concurrent update conflict probability on real-world datasets. Meanwhile, we compare GraphFlow with two existing representative graph processing systems. Experimental results show GraphFlow achieves low latency and outperforms other graph processing systems given large datasets.