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Recently, there have been many disk-based systems proposed for iterative graph processing. In the popular vertex/edge-centric systems, an iterative directed graph algorithm needs to reprocess many partitions so as to update their vertices’ states according to other non-convergent vertices for the unawareness of their dependencies. As a result, it induces high data access cost and a long time to converge. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel system for iterative directed graph processing with taking advantage of the strongly connected component (SCC) structure. It stores a directed graph into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) sketch, with each node representing a SCC in the original data graph. During execution, the SCCs are loaded into memory for processing in a parallel way according to the topological order of the DAG sketch, and the vertices in each SCC are tried to be handled along the directed paths. In this way, each SCC is able to reach convergence in order and needs to be loaded into the main memory for exactly once, getting much lower data access cost and faster convergence. Besides, the vertices of each SCC need fewer updates for convergence. We further develop a lightweight approach to maintain the DAG sketch and handle SCCs in an incremental way for evolving graphs. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, experimental results show that our approach achieves a performance improvements of 1.46-8.37 times for static graphs, and can reduce the execution time by 61.4-72.7 percent for evolving graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For large-scale graph analysis on a single PC, asynchronous processing methods are known to converge more quickly than the synchronous approach, because of more efficient propagation of vertices state. However, current asynchronous methods are still very suboptimal in propagating state across different graph partitions. This presents a bottleneck for cross-partition state update and slows down the convergence of the processing task. To tackle this problem, we propose a new method, named the HotGraph, to faster graph processing by extracting a backbone structure, called hot graph, that spans all the partitions of the original graph. With this approach, most cross-partition state propagations in traditional solutions now take place within only a few hot graph partitions, thus removing the cross-partition bottleneck. We also develop a partition scheduling algorithm to maximize the hot graph’s effectiveness by keeping it in memory and assigning it the highest priority for processing as much as possible. A forward and backward sweeping execution strategy is then proposed to further accelerate the convergence. Experimental results show that HotGraph can reduce the number of vertex state updates processed by 51.5 percent, compared with state-of-the-art schemes. Applying our optimizations further reduces this number by 72.6 percent and the execution time by 80.8 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parameter-server frameworks play an important role in scaling-up distributed deep learning algorithms. However, the constant growth of neural network size has led to a serious bottleneck on exchanging parameters across machines. Recent efforts rely on manually setting a parameter-exchanging interval to reduce communication overhead, regardless of the parameter-server's resource availability as well. It may face poor performance or inaccurate results for inappropriate interval. Meanwhile, request burst may occur, exacerbating the bottleneck. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically set the optimal exchanging interval, aiming to remove the parameter-exchanging bottleneck and to evenly utilize resources without losing training accuracy. The key idea is to increase the interval on different training nodes on the basis of the knowledge of available resources and choose different intervals for each slave node to avoid request bursts. We adopted this method to optimize the parallel Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm, through which we successfully sped up parameter-exchanging process by eight times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To support the ever-increasing data traffic demands, the Internet has been experiencing a rapid growth in recent decades. Effective and efficient monitoring is highly needed in order to properly manage such complex infrastructure. It is of theoretical and practical significance to derive network device importance (i.e., node rank) for resource utilization optimization, user experience improvement, and security enhancement. Recent development in the Internet infrastructure has introduced prosperous in-network computation resources across the network. To exploit such distributed resources, in this article, we propose a core-graphbased framework, called FRank, for fast node ranking algorithms, which accelerates convergence and reduces communication cost by converting most inter-partition state change propagations into intra-partition ones. We have implemented FRank in a cluster to validate its correctness and efficiency. The experiment results demonstrate that at the least FRank reduces the execution time of existing cutting-edge methods by 30.2 percent with 43.5 percent less communication cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In virtualization environments, static memory allocation for virtual machines (VMs) can lead to severe service level agreement (SLA) violations or inefficient use of memory. Dynamic memory allocation mechanisms such as ballooning and memory hotplug were proposed to handle the dynamics of memory demands. However, these mechanisms so far have not been quantitatively or comparatively studied. In this paper, we first develop a runtime system called U-tube, which provides a framework to adopt memory hotplug or ballooning for dynamic memory allocation. We then implement fine-grained memory hotplug in Xen. We demonstrate the effectiveness of U-tube for dynamic memory management through two case studies: dynamic memory balancing and memory overcommitment. With these two case studies, we make a quantitative comparison between memory hotplug and ballooning. The experiments show that there is no absolute winner for different scenarios. Our findings can be very useful for practitioners to choose the suitable dynamic memory management techniques in different scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]