TurboGraph: a fast parallel graph engine handling billion-scale graphs in a single PC

Graphs are used to model many real objects such as social networks and web graphs. Many real applications in various fields require efficient and effective management of large-scale graph structured data. Although distributed graph engines such as GBase and Pregel handle billion-scale graphs, the user needs to be skilled at managing and tuning a distributed system in a cluster, which is a nontrivial job for the ordinary user. Furthermore, these distributed systems need many machines in a cluster in order to provide reasonable performance. In order to address this problem, a disk-based parallel graph engine called Graph-Chi, has been recently proposed. Although Graph-Chi significantly outperforms all representative (disk-based) distributed graph engines, we observe that Graph-Chi still has serious performance problems for many important types of graph queries due to 1) limited parallelism and 2) separate steps for I/O processing and CPU processing. In this paper, we propose a general, disk-based graph engine called TurboGraph to process billion-scale graphs very efficiently by using modern hardware on a single PC. TurboGraph is the first truly parallel graph engine that exploits 1) full parallelism including multi-core parallelism and FlashSSD IO parallelism and 2) full overlap of CPU processing and I/O processing as much as possible. Specifically, we propose a novel parallel execution model, called pin-and-slide. TurboGraph also provides engine-level operators such as BFS which are implemented under the pin-and-slide model. Extensive experimental results with large real datasets show that TurboGraph consistently and significantly outperforms Graph-Chi by up to four orders of magnitude! Our implementation of TurboGraph is available at ``http://wshan.net/turbograph}" as executable files.