Scalable static and dynamic community detection using Grappolo

Abstract

Graph clustering, popularly known as community detection, is a fundamental kernel for several applications of relevance to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) Program. Clusters or communities represent natural divisions within a network that are densely connected within a cluster and sparsely connected to the rest of the network. The need to compute clustering on large scale data necessitates the development of efficient algorithms that can exploit modern architectures that are fundamentally parallel in nature. However, due to their irregular and inherently sequential nature, many of the current algorithms for community detection are challenging to parallelize. In response to the HIVE Graph Challenge, we present several parallelization heuristics for fast community detection using the Louvain method as the serial template. We implement all the heuristics in a software library called Grappolo. Using the inputs from the HIVE Challenge, we demonstrate superior performance and high quality solutions based on four parallelization heuristics. We use Grappolo on static graphs as the first step towards community detection on streaming graphs.