2PS: High-Quality Edge Partitioning with Two-Phase Streaming

Abstract

Graph partitioning is an important preprocessing step to distributed graph processing. In edge partitioning, the edge set of a given graph is split into $k$ equally-sized partitions, such that the replication of vertices across partitions is minimized. Streaming is a viable approach to partition graphs that exceed the memory capacities of a single server. The graph is ingested as a stream of edges, and one edge at a time is immediately and irrevocably assigned to a partition based on a scoring function. However, streaming partitioning suffers from the uninformed assignment problem: At the time of partitioning early edges in the stream, there is no information available about the rest of the edges. As a consequence, edge assignments are often driven by balancing considerations, and the achieved replication factor is comparably high. In this paper, we propose 2PS, a novel two-phase streaming algorithm for high-quality edge partitioning. In the first phase, vertices are separated into clusters by a lightweight streaming clustering algorithm. In the second phase, the graph is re-streamed and edge partitioning is performed while taking into account the clustering of the vertices from the first phase. Our evaluations show that 2PS can achieve a replication factor that is comparable to heavy-weight random access partitioners while inducing orders of magnitude lower memory overhead.