Graph Programming Interface (GPI): A Linear Algebra Programming Model for Large Scale Graph Computations

Graph processing is becoming a crucial component for analyzing big data arising in many application domains such as social and biological networks, fraud detection, and sentiment analysis. As a result, a number of computational models for graph analytics have been proposed in the literature to help users write efficient large scale graph algorithms. In this paper we present an alternative model for implementing graph algorithms using a linear algebra based specification. We first specify a set of linear algebra primitives that allows users to express graph algorithms by composition of linear algebra operations. We then describe a high performance implementation of these primitives using C+ + and subsequently its integration with the Spark framework to achieve the scalability we need for large systems. We provide an overview of our implementation and also compare and contrast the expressiveness and performance of various algorithms implemented with our approach with that of the current Spark GraphX implementation of those algorithms.