Critical Path Awareness Techniques for Large-Scale Graph Partitioning

Graph partitioning is one of the fundamental problems in many graph-based applications and systems. It enables the division of a graph into smaller sub-graphs for subsequent parallel processing, reducing the processing latency of the graph. The critical path of a graph is the logical path with the longest delay from input to output. The processing time of the graph mainly depends on the delay incurred by the critical path, independent of other paths with small delays. Therefore, it can reduce the processing time of the graph by protecting the critical path of the graph from partition. However, existing approaches to graph partitioning only focus on metrics such as minimum cut and partition balance. As a result, the critical paths of graphs may be destroyed in the partitioning procedure. To address this problem, we present a critical path awareness approach, namely path-metis, to protect the critical paths and alleviate the processing latency after graph partitioning. In path-metis, two efficient strategies, including Slack and critical path fix strategies, are introduced. The Slack strategy, which incorporates critical path information into the weights of DAG, is used as pre-processing before traditional multi-level partitioning methods, like Metis. Then, for the generated partitioning scheme, the critical path fix strategy is proposed to further protect critical paths from being cut. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both real and synthetic datasets. From the experimental results, compared to Metis, our method improves critical path performance by 17.70%.