Incremental Graph Processing for On-line Analytics

Abstract

Modern data generation is enormous; we now capture events at increasingly fine granularity, and require processing at rates approaching real-time. For graph analytics, this explosion in data volumes and processing demands has not been matched by improved algorithmic or infrastructure techniques. Instead of exploring solutions to keep up with the velocity of the generated data, most of today's systems focus on analyzing individually built historic snapshots. Modern graph analytics pipelines must evolve to become viable at massive scale, and move away from static, post-processing scenarios to support on-line analysis. This paper presents our progress towards a system that analyzes dynamic incremental graphs, responsive at single-change granularity. We present an algorithmic structure using principles of recursive updates and monotonic convergence, and a set of incremental graph algorithms that can be implemented based on this structure. We also present the required middleware to support graph analytics at fine, event-level granularity. We envision that graph topology changes are processed asynchronously, concurrently, and independently (without shared state), converging an algorithm's state (e.g. single-source shortest path distances, connectivity analysis labeling) to its deterministic answer. The expected long-term impact of this work is to enable a transition away from offline graph analytics, allowing knowledge to be extracted from networked systems in real-time.