arXiv subjects

Matei Ripeanu

Publications and source records attributed to Matei Ripeanu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

SSSP-Del: Fully Dynamic Distributed Algorithm for Single-Source Shortest Path

Modern graphs are both large and dynamic, presenting significant challenges for fundamental queries, such as the Single-Source Shortest Path (SSSP) problem. Naively recomputing the SSSP tree after each topology change is prohibitively expensive, causing on-demand computation to suffer from high latency. Existing dynamic SSSP algorithms often cannot simultaneously handle both edge additions and deletions, operate in distributed memory, and provide low-latency query results. To address these challenges, this paper presents SSSP-Del, a new vertex-centric, asynchronous, and fully distributed algorithm for dynamic SSSP. Operating in a shared-nothing architecture, our algorithm processes streams of both edge insertions and deletions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on large real-world and synthetic graphs with millions of vertices, and provide a thorough analysis by evaluating result latency, solution stability, and throughput.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Maximum Flow on Highly Dynamic Graphs

Recent advances in dynamic graph processing have enabled the analysis of highly dynamic graphs with change at rates as high as millions of edge changes per second. Solutions in this domain, however, have been demonstrated only for relatively simple algorithms like PageRank, breadth-first search, and connected components. Expanding beyond this, we explore the maximum flow problem, a fundamental, yet more complex problem, in graph analytics. We propose a novel, distributed algorithm for max-flow on dynamic graphs, and implement it on top of an asynchronous vertex-centric abstraction. We show that our algorithm can process both additions and deletions of vertices and edges efficiently at scale on fast-evolving graphs, and provide a comprehensive analysis by evaluating, in addition to throughput, two criteria that are important when applied to real-world problems: result latency and solution stability.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

Scalable Pattern Matching in Metadata Graphs via Constraint Checking

Pattern matching is a fundamental tool for answering complex graph queries. Unfortunately, existing solutions have limited capabilities: they do not scale to process large graphs and/or support only a restricted set of search templates or usage scenarios. We present an algorithmic pipeline that bases pattern matching on constraint checking. The key intuition is that each vertex or edge participating in a match has to meet a set of constrains implicitly specified by the search template. The pipeline we propose, generates these constraints and iterates over them to eliminate all the vertices and edges that do not participate in any match, and reduces the background graph to a subgraph which is the union of all matches. Additional analysis can be performed on this annotated, reduced graph, such as full match enumeration. Furthermore, a vertex-centric formulation for constraint checking algorithms exists, and this makes it possible to harness existing high-performance, vertex-centric graph processing frameworks. The key contribution of this work is a design following the constraint checking approach for exact matching and its experimental evaluation. We show that the proposed technique: (i) enables highly scalable pattern matching in labeled graphs, (ii) supports arbitrary patterns with 100% precision, (iii) always selects all vertices and edges that participate in matches, thus offering 100% recall, and (iv) supports a set of popular data analysis scenarios. We implement our approach on top of HavoqGT, an open-source asynchronous graph processing framework, and demonstrate its advantages through strong and weak scaling experiments on massive scale real-world (up to 257 billion edges) and synthetic (up to 4.4 trillion edges) labeled graphs respectively, and at scales (1,024 nodes / 36,864 cores), orders of magnitude larger than used in the past for similar problems.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

Forecasting Suspicious Account Activity at Large-Scale Online Service Providers

In the face of large-scale automated social engineering attacks to large online services, fast detection and remediation of compromised accounts are crucial to limit the spread of new attacks and to mitigate the overall damage to users, companies, and the public at large. We advocate a fully automated approach based on machine learning: we develop an early warning system that harnesses account activity traces to predict which accounts are likely to be compromised in the future and generate suspicious activity. We hypothesize that this early warning is key for a more timely detection of compromised accounts and consequently faster remediation. We demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the system through an experiment at a large-scale online service provider using four months of real-world production data encompassing hundreds of millions of users. We show that - even using only login data to derive features with low computational cost, and a basic model selection approach - our classifier can be tuned to achieve good classification precision when used for forecasting. Our system correctly identifies up to one month in advance the accounts later flagged as suspicious with precision, recall, and false positive rates that indicate the mechanism is likely to prove valuable in operational settings to support additional layers of defense.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2015

Assessing the Value of Peer-Produced Information for Exploratory Search

Tagging is a popular feature that supports several collaborative tasks, including search, as tags produced by one user can help others finding relevant content. However, task performance depends on the existence of 'good' tags. A first step towards creating incentives for users to produce 'good' tags is the quantification of their value in the first place. This work fills this gap by combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. In particular, using contextual interviews, we first determine aspects that influence users' perception of tags' value for exploratory search. Next, we formalize some of the identified aspects and propose an information-theoretical method with provable properties that quantifies the two most important aspects (according to the qualitative analysis) that influence the perception of tag value: the ability of a tag to reduce the search space while retrieving relevant items to the user. The evaluation on real data shows that our method is accurate: tags that users consider more important have higher value than tags users have not expressed interest.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Accelerating Direction-Optimized Breadth First Search on Hybrid Architectures

Large scale-free graphs are famously difficult to process efficiently: the skewed vertex degree distribution makes it difficult to obtain balanced partitioning. Our research instead aims to turn this into an advantage by partitioning the workload to match the strength of the individual computing elements in a Hybrid, GPU-accelerated architecture. As a proof of concept we focus on the direction-optimized breadth first search algorithm. We present the key graph partitioning, workload allocation, and communication strategies required for massive concurrency and good overall performance. We show that exploiting specialization enables gains as high as 2.4x in terms of time-to-solution and 2.0x in terms of energy efficiency by adding 2 GPUs to a 2 CPU-only baseline, for synthetic graphs with up to 16 Billion undirected edges as well as for large real-world graphs. We also show that, for a capped energy envelope, it is more efficient to add a GPU than an additional CPU. Finally, our performance would place us at the top of today's [Green]Graph500 challenges for Scale29 graphs.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2014

Efficient Large-Scale Graph Processing on Hybrid CPU and GPU Systems

The increasing scale and wealth of inter-connected data, such as those accrued by social network applications, demand the design of new techniques and platforms to efficiently derive actionable knowledge from large-scale graphs. However, real-world graphs are famously difficult to process efficiently. Not only they have a large memory footprint, but also most graph algorithms entail memory access patterns with poor locality, data-dependent parallelism and a low compute-to-memory access ratio. Moreover, most real-world graphs have a highly heterogeneous node degree distribution, hence partitioning these graphs for parallel processing and simultaneously achieving access locality and load-balancing is difficult. This work starts from the hypothesis that hybrid platforms (e.g., GPU-accelerated systems) have both the potential to cope with the heterogeneous structure of real graphs and to offer a cost-effective platform for high-performance graph processing. This work assesses this hypothesis and presents an extensive exploration of the opportunity to harness hybrid systems to process large-scale graphs efficiently. In particular, (i) we present a performance model that estimates the achievable performance on hybrid platforms; (ii) informed by the performance model, we design and develop TOTEM - a processing engine that provides a convenient environment to implement graph algorithms on hybrid platforms; (iii) we show that further performance gains can be extracted using partitioning strategies that aim to produce partitions that each matches the strengths of the processing element it is allocated to, finally, (iv) we demonstrate the performance advantages of the hybrid system through a comprehensive evaluation that uses real and synthetic workloads (as large as 16 billion edges), multiple graph algorithms that stress the system in various ways, and a variety of hardware configurations.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2014

Systems for Near Real-Time Analysis of Large-Scale Dynamic Graphs

Graphs are widespread data structures used to model a wide variety of problems. The sheer amount of data to be processed has prompted the creation of a myriad of systems that help us cope with massive scale graphs. The pressure to deliver fast responses to queries on the graph is higher than ever before, as it is demanded by many applications (e.g. online recommendations, auctions, terrorism protection, etc.). In addition, graphs change continuously (so do the real world entities that typically represent). Systems must be ready for both: near real-time and dynamic massive graphs. We survey systems taking their scalability, real-time potential and capability to support dynamic changes to the graph as driving guidelines. The main techniques and limitations are distilled and categorised. The algorithms run on top of graph systems are not ready for prime time dynamism either. Therefore,a short overview on dynamic graph algorithms has also been included.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2013

Predicting Intermediate Storage Performance for Workflow Applications

Configuring a storage system to better serve an application is a challenging task complicated by a multidimensional, discrete configuration space and the high cost of space exploration (e.g., by running the application with different storage configurations). To enable selecting the best configuration in a reasonable time, we design an end-to-end performance prediction mechanism that estimates the turn-around time of an application using storage system under a given configuration. This approach focuses on a generic object-based storage system design, supports exploring the impact of optimizations targeting workflow applications (e.g., various data placement schemes) in addition to other, more traditional, configuration knobs (e.g., stripe size or replication level), and models the system operation at data-chunk and control message level. This paper presents our experience to date with designing and using this prediction mechanism. We evaluate this mechanism using micro- as well as synthetic benchmarks mimicking real workflow applications, and a real application.. A preliminary evaluation shows that we are on a good track to meet our objectives: it can scale to model a workflow application run on an entire cluster while offering an over 200x speedup factor (normalized by resource) compared to running the actual application, and can achieve, in the limited number of scenarios we study, a prediction accuracy that enables identifying the best storage system configuration.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2013

The Case for Cross-Layer Optimizations in Storage: A Workflow-Optimized Storage System

This paper proposes using file system custom metadata as a bidirectional communication channel between applications and the storage system. This channel can be used to pass hints that enable cross-layer optimizations, an option hindered today by the ossified file-system interface. We study this approach in context of storage system support for large-scale workflow execution systems: Our workflow optimized storage system (WOSS), exploits application hints to provide per-file optimized operations, and exposes data location to enable location-aware scheduling. This paper argues that an incremental adoption path for adopting cross-layer optimizations in storage systems exists, presents the system architecture for a workflow-optimized storage system and its integration with a workflow runtime engine, and evaluates the proposed approach using synthetic as well as real applications workloads.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2013

Reuse, Temporal Dynamics, Interest Sharing, and Collaboration in Social Tagging Systems

User-generated content is shaping the dynamics of the World Wide Web. Indeed, an increasingly large number of systems provide mechanisms to support the growing demand for content creation, sharing, and management. Tagging systems are a particular class of these systems where users share and collaboratively annotate content such as photos and URLs. This collaborative behavior and the pool of user-generated metadata create opportunities to improve existing systems and to design new mechanisms. However, to realize this potential, it is necessary to understand the usage characteristics of current systems. This work addresses this issue characterizing three tagging systems (CiteULike, Connotea and del.icio.us) while focusing on three aspects: i) the patterns of information (tags and items) production; ii) the temporal dynamics of users' tag vocabularies; and, iii) the social aspects of tagging systems.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2012

GPUs as Storage System Accelerators

Massively multicore processors, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), provide, at a comparable price, a one order of magnitude higher peak performance than traditional CPUs. This drop in the cost of computation, as any order-of-magnitude drop in the cost per unit of performance for a class of system components, triggers the opportunity to redesign systems and to explore new ways to engineer them to recalibrate the cost-to-performance relation. This project explores the feasibility of harnessing GPUs' computational power to improve the performance, reliability, or security of distributed storage systems. In this context, we present the design of a storage system prototype that uses GPU offloading to accelerate a number of computationally intensive primitives based on hashing, and introduce techniques to efficiently leverage the processing power of GPUs. We evaluate the performance of this prototype under two configurations: as a content addressable storage system that facilitates online similarity detection between successive versions of the same file and as a traditional system that uses hashing to preserve data integrity. Further, we evaluate the impact of offloading to the GPU on competing applications' performance. Our results show that this technique can bring tangible performance gains without negatively impacting the performance of concurrently running applications.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2011

Cheaters in the Steam Community Gaming Social Network

Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. One unfortunate phenomenon, however, poisons the competition and the fun: cheating. The costs of cheating span from industry-supported expenditures to detect and limit cheating, to victims' monetary losses due to cyber crime. This paper studies cheaters in the Steam Community, an online social network built on top of the world's dominant digital game delivery platform. We collected information about more than 12 million gamers connected in a global social network, of which more than 700 thousand have their profiles flagged as cheaters. We also collected in-game interaction data of over 10 thousand players from a popular multiplayer gaming server. We show that cheaters are well embedded in the social and interaction networks: their network position is largely undistinguishable from that of fair players. We observe that the cheating behavior appears to spread through a social mechanism: the presence and the number of cheater friends of a fair player is correlated with the likelihood of her becoming a cheater in the future. Also, we observe that there is a social penalty involved with being labeled as a cheater: cheaters are likely to switch to more restrictive privacy settings once they are tagged and they lose more friends than fair players. Finally, we observe that the number of cheaters is not correlated with the geographical, real-world population density, or with the local popularity of the Steam Community. This analysis can ultimately inform the design of mechanisms to deal with anti-social behavior (e.g., spamming, automated collection of data) in generic online social networks.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2011

Many-Task Computing Tools for Multiscale Modeling

This paper discusses the use of many-task computing tools for multiscale modeling. It defines multiscale modeling and places different examples of it on a coupling spectrum, discusses the Swift parallel scripting language, describes three multiscale modeling applications that could use Swift, and then talks about how the Swift model is being extended to cover more of the multiscale modeling coupling spectrum.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2010

CrystalGPU: Transparent and Efficient Utilization of GPU Power

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has recently gained considerable attention in various domains such as bioinformatics, databases and distributed computing. GPGPU is based on using the GPU as a co-processor accelerator to offload computationally-intensive tasks from the CPU. This study starts from the observation that a number of GPU features (such as overlapping communication and computation, short lived buffer reuse, and harnessing multi-GPU systems) can be abstracted and reused across different GPGPU applications. This paper describes CrystalGPU, a modular framework that transparently enables applications to exploit a number of GPU optimizations. Our evaluation shows that CrystalGPU enables up to 16x speedup gains on synthetic benchmarks, while introducing negligible latency overhead.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2009

Efficient and Spontaneous Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Secure Vehicular Communications

This paper introduces an efficient and spontaneous privacy-preserving protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks based on revocable ring signature. The proposed protocol has three appealing characteristics: First, it offers conditional privacy-preservation: while a receiver can verify that a message issuer is an authorized participant in the system only a trusted authority can reveal the true identity of a message sender. Second, it is spontaneous: safety messages can be authenticated locally, without support from the roadside units or contacting other vehicles. Third, it is efficient by offering fast message authentication and verification, cost-effective identity tracking in case of a dispute, and low storage requirements. We use extensive analysis to demonstrate the merits of the proposed protocol and to contrast it with previously proposed solutions.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2008

Content Reuse and Interest Sharing in Tagging Communities

Tagging communities represent a subclass of a broader class of user-generated content-sharing online communities. In such communities users introduce and tag content for later use. Although recent studies advocate and attempt to harness social knowledge in this context by exploiting collaboration among users, little research has been done to quantify the current level of user collaboration in these communities. This paper introduces two metrics to quantify the level of collaboration: content reuse and shared interest. Using these two metrics, this paper shows that the current level of collaboration in CiteULike and Connotea is consistently low, which significantly limits the potential of harnessing the social knowledge in communities. This study also discusses implications of these findings in the context of recommendation and reputation systems.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2007

stdchk: A Checkpoint Storage System for Desktop Grid Computing

Checkpointing is an indispensable technique to provide fault tolerance for long-running high-throughput applications like those running on desktop grids. This paper argues that a dedicated checkpoint storage system, optimized to operate in these environments, can offer multiple benefits: reduce the load on a traditional file system, offer high-performance through specialization, and, finally, optimize data management by taking into account checkpoint application semantics. Such a storage system can present a unifying abstraction to checkpoint operations, while hiding the fact that there are no dedicated resources to store the checkpoint data. We prototype stdchk, a checkpoint storage system that uses scavenged disk space from participating desktops to build a low-cost storage system, offering a traditional file system interface for easy integration with applications. This paper presents the stdchk architecture, key performance optimizations, support for incremental checkpointing, and increased data availability. Our evaluation confirms that the stdchk approach is viable in a desktop grid setting and offers a low cost storage system with desirable performance characteristics: high write throughput and reduced storage space and network effort to save checkpoint images.

cs.DC↗