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Large-scale graph analysis and visualization is becoming a more challenging task, due to the increasing amount of graph data. This dissertation focuses on methods to ease the task of exploring large-scale graphs through graph sampling and visualization. Graph sampling aims to reduce the complexity of graph drawing, while preserving properties of the original graph, allowing analysis of the smaller sample which yields the characteristics similar to those of the original graph. Graph visualization is an effective and intuitive approach to observing structures within graph data. For large-scale graphs, graph sampling and visualization are straightforward strategies to gain insights into common issues that are often encountered. This dissertation evaluates commonly used graph sampling methods through a combined visual and statistical comparison of graphs sampled at various rates based on random graphs, small-world graphs, scaleree graphs, and real-world graphs. This benchmark study can be used as a guideline in choosing the appropriate method for a particular graph sampling task. In addition, this thesis proposes three types of distributed sampling algorithms and develops a sampling package on Spark. Compared with traditional/non-distributed graph sampling approaches, the scalable distributed sampling approaches are as reliable as the traditional/non-distributed graph sampling techniques, and they bring much needed improvement to sampling efficiency, especially with regards to topology-based sampling. This benchmark study in traditional/non-distributed graph sampling is also applicable to distributed graph sampling as well. A contribution to the area of graph visualization is also made through the presentation of a scalable graph visualization system-BGS (Big Graph Surfer) that creates hierarchical structure from an original graph and provides interactive navigation along the hierarchy by expanding or collapsing clusters when visualizing large-scale graphs. A distributed computing framework-Spark provides the backend for BGS on clustering and visualization. This architecture makes it capable of visualizing a graph up to 1 billion nodes or edges in real-time. In addition, BGS provides a series of hierarchy and graph exploration methods, such as hierarchy view, hierarchy navigation, hierarchy search, graph view, graph navigation, graph search, and other useful interactions. These functionalities facilitate the exploration of very large-scale graphs. Evaluation of BGS is performed through application to several representative of large-scale graph datasets and comparison with other existing graph visualization tools in scalability, usability, and flexibility. The dissertation concludes with a summarization of the contributions and their improvement on large-scale graph analysis and visualization, and a discussion about possible future work on this research field.

Graph algorithms are ubiquitously used across domains. They exhibit parallelism, which can be exploited on parallel architectures, such as multi-core processors and accelerators. However, real world graphs are massive in size and cannot fit into the memory of a single machine. Such large graphs are partitioned and processed in a distributed cluster environment which consists of multiple GPUs and CPUs. Existing frameworks that facilitate large scale graph processing in the distributed cluster have their own style of programming and require extensive involvement by the user in communication and synchronization aspects. Adaptation of these frameworks appears to be an overhead for a programmer. Furthermore, these frameworks have been developed to target only CPU clusters and lack the ability to harness the GPU architecture. We provide a back-end framework to the graph Domain Specific Language, Falcon, for large scale graph processing on CPU and GPU clusters. The Motivation behind choosing this DSL as a front-end is its shared-memory based imperative programmability feature. Our framework generates Giraph code for CPU clusters. Giraph code runs on the Hadoop cluster and is known for scalable and fault-tolerant graph processing. For GPU cluster, Our framework applies a set of optimizations to reduce computation and communication latency, and generates efficient CUDA code coupled with MPI. Experimental evaluations show the scalability and performance of our framework for both CPU and GPU clusters. The performance of the framework generated code is comparable to the manual implementations of various algorithms in distributed environments.

1. Main Contributions made by the supplicant: This thesis proposes an Open Computing Language (OpenCL) framework to address the challenges of implementation of graph algorithms on parallel architectures and large scale graph processing. The proposed framework uses the front-end of the existing Falcon DSL compiler, andso, programmers enjoy conventional, imperative and shared memory programming style. The back-end of the framework generates implementations of graph algorithms in OpenCL to target single device architectures. The generated OpenCL code is portable across various platforms, e.g., CPU and GPU, and also vendors, e.g., NVIDIA, Intel and AMD. The framework automatically generates code for thread management and memory management for the devices. It hides all the lower level programming details from the programmers. A few optimizations are applied to reduce the execution time. The large graph processing challenge is tackled through graph partitioning over multiple devices of a single node and multiple nodes of a distributed cluster. The programmer codes a graph algorithm in Falcon assuming that the graph fits into single machine memory and the framework handles graph partitioning without any intervention by the programmer. The framework analyses the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) generated by Falcon to find all the necessary information about communication and synchronization. It automatically generates code for message passing to hide the complexity of programming in a distributed environment. The framework also applies a set of optimizations to minimize the communication latency. The thesis reports results of several experiments conducted on widely used graph algorithms: single source shortest path, pagerank and minimum spanning tree to name a few. Experimental evaluations show that the reported results are comparable to the state-of-art non-portable graph DSLs and frameworks on a single node. Experiments in a distributed environment to show the scalability and efficiency of the framework are also described. 2. Summary of the Referees' Written Comments: Extracts from the referees' reports are provided below. A copy of the written replies to the clarifications sought by the external examiner is appended to this report. Referee 1: This thesis extends the Falcon framework with OpenCL for parallel graph processing on multi-device and multi-node architectures. The thesis makes important contributions. Processing large graphs in short time is very important, and making use of multiple nodes and devices is perhaps the only way to achieve this. Towards this, the thesis makes good contributions for easy programming, compiler transformations and efficient runtime systems. One of the commendable aspects of the thesis that it demonstrates with graphs that cannot be accommodated In the memory of a single device. The thesis is generally written well. The related work coverage is very good. The magnitude of thesis excellent for a Masters work. The experimental setup is very comprehensive with good set of graphs, good experimental comparisons with state-of-art works and good platforms. Particularly. the demonstration with a GPU cluster with multiple GPU nodes (Chapter 5) is excellent. The attempt to demonstrate scalability with 2, 4 and 8 nodes is also noteworthy. However, the contributions on optimizations are weak. Most of the optimizations and compiler transformations are straight-forward. There should be summary observations on the results in Chapter 3, especially given that the results are mixed and don't quite clearly convey the clear advantages of their work. The same is the case with multi-device results in chapter 4, where the results are once again mixed. Similarly, the speedups and scalability achieved with multiple nodes are not great. The problem size justification in the multi-node results is not clear. (Referee 1 also indicates a couple of minor changes to the thesis). Referee 2: The thesis uses the OpenCL framework to address the problem of programming graph algorithms on distributed systems. The use of OpenCL ensures that the generated code is platform-agnoistic and vendor-agnoistic. Sufficient experimentation with large scale graphs and reasonable size clusters have been conducted to demonstrate the scalability and portability of the code generated by the framework. The automatically generated code is almost as efficient as manually written code. The thesis is well written and is of high quality. The related work section is well organized and displays a good knowledge of the subject matter under consideration. The author has made important contributions to a good publication as well. 3. An Account of the Open Oral Examination: The oral examination of Ms. Parita Patel took place during 10 AM and 11AM on 27th November 2017, in the Seminar Hall of the Department of Computer Science and Automation. The members of the Oral Examination Board present were, Prof. Sathish Vadhiyar, external examiner and Prof. Y. N. Srikant, research supervisor. The candidate presented the work in an open defense seminar highlighting the problem domain, the methodology used, the investigations carried out by her, and the resulting contributions documented in the thesis before an audience consisting of the examiners, some faculty members, and students. Some of the questions posed by the examiners and the members of the audience during the oral examination are listed below. 1. How much is the overlap between Falcon work and this thesis? Response: We have used the Falcon front end in our work. Further, the existing Falcon compiler was useful to us to test our own implementation of algorithms in Falcon. 2. Why are speedup and scalability not very high with multiple nodes? Response: For the multi-node architecture, we were not able to achieve linear scalability because, with the increase in number of nodes, communication cost increases significantly. Unless the computation cost in the nodes is significant and is much more than the communication cost, this is bound to happen. 3. Do you have plans of making the code available for use by the community? Response: The code includes some part of Falcon implementation (front-end parsing/grammar) also. After discussion with the author of Falcon, the code can be made available to the community. 4. How can a graph that does not fit into a single device fit into a single node in the case of multiple nodes? Response: Single node machine used in the experiments of “multi-device architecture” contains multiple devices while each node used in experiments of “multi-node architecture” contains only a single device. So, the graph which does not fit into single-node-single-device memory can fit into single-node-multi-device after partitioning. 5. Is there a way to permit morph algorithms to be coded in your framework? Response: Currently, our framework does not translate morph algorithms. Supporting morph algorithms will require some kind of runtime system to manage memory on GPU since morph algorithms add and remove the vertices and edges to the graph dynamically. This can be further explored in future work. 6. Is it possible to accommodate FPGA devices in your framework? Response: Yes, we can support FPGA devices (or any other device that is compatible for OpenCL) just by specifying the device type in the command line argument. We did not work with other devices because CPU and GPU are generally used to process graph algorithms. The candidate provided satisfactory answers to all the questions posed and the clarifications sought by the audience and the examiners during the presentation. The candidate's overall performance during the open defense and the oral examination was very satisfactory to the oral examination board. 4. Certificate of Corrections and Changes: All the necessary corrections and changes suggested by the examiners have been made in the thesis and these have been verified by the members of the oral examination board. The thesis has been recommended for acceptance in its revised form. 5. Final Recommendation: In view of the recommendations of the referees and the satisfactory performance of the candidate in the oral examination, the oral examination board recommends that the thesis of Ms. ParitaPatel be accepted for the award of the M.Sc(Engg.) Degree of the Institute. Response to the comments by the external examiner on the M.Sc(Engg.) thesis “Compilation of Graph Algorithms for Hybrid, Cross-Platform, and Distributed Architectures” by Parita Patel 1. Comment: The contributions on optimizations are weak. Response: The novelty of this thesis is to make the Falcon platform agnostic, and additionally process large scale graphs on multi-devices of a single node and multi-node clusters seamlessly. Our framework performs similar to the existing frameworks, but at the same time, it targets several types of architectures which are not possible in the existing works. Advanced optimizations are beyond the scope of this thesis. 2. Comment: The translation of Falcon to OpenCL is simple. While the translation of Falcon to OpenCL was not hard, figuring out the details of the translation for multi-device and multi-node architectures was not simple. For example, design of implementations for collection, set, global variables, concurrency, etc., were non-trivial. These designs have already been explained in the appropriate places in the thesis. Further, such large software introduced its own intricacies during development. 3. Comment: Lines between Falcon work and this work are not clear. Response: Appendix-A shows the falcon implementation of all the algorithms which we used to run the experiments. We compiled these falcon implementations through our framework and subsequently ran the generated code on different types of target architectures and compared the results with other framework's generated code. These falcon programs were written by us. We have also used the front-end of the Falcon compiler and this has already been stated in the thesis (page 16). 4. Comment: There should be a summary of observations in chapter 3. Response: Summary of observations have been added to chapter 3 (pages 35-36), chapter 4 (page 46), and chapter 5 (page 51) of the thesis. 5. Comment: Speedup and scalability achieved with multiple nodes are not great. Response: For the multi-node architecture, we were not able to achieve linear scalability because, with the increase in number of nodes, communication cost increases significantly. Unless the computation cost in the nodes is significant and is much more than the communication cost, this is bound to happen. 6. Comment: It will be good to separate the related work coverage into a separate chapter. Response: The related work is coherent with the flow in chapter 1. It consists of just 4.5 pages and separating it into a separate chapter would make both (rest of) chapter 1 and the new chapter very small. Therefore, we do not recommend it. 7. Comment: The code should be made available for use by the community. Response: The code includes some part of Falcon code (front-end parsing/grammar) also. After discussion with the author of Falcon, the code can be made available to the community. 8. Comment: Page 28: Shouldn’t the else part be inside the kernel? Response: There was some missing text and a few minor changes in Figure 3.14 (page 28) which have been incorporated in the corrected thesis. 9. Comment: Figure 4.1 needs to be explained better. Response: Explanation for Figure 4.1 (pages 38-39) has been added to the thesis. 10. Comment: The problem size justification in the multi-node results is not clear. Response: Single node machine used in the experiments of “multi-device architecture” contains multiple devices while each node used in experiments of “multi-node architecture” contains only a single device. So, the graph which does not fit into single-node-single-device memory can fit into single-node-multi-device after partitioning. Name of the Candidate: Parita Patel (S.R. No. 04-04-00-10-21-14-1-11610) Degree Registered: M.Sc(Engg.) Department: Computer Science & Automation Title of the Thesis: Compilation of Graph Algorithms for Hybrid, Cross-Platform and Graph algorithms are abundantly used in various disciplines. These algorithms perform poorly due to random memory access and negligible spatial locality. In order to improve performance, parallelism exhibited by these algorithms can be exploited by leveraging modern high performance parallel computing resources. Implementing graph algorithms for these parallel architectures requires manual thread management and memory management which becomes tedious for a programmer. Large scale graphs cannot fit into the memory of a single machine. One solution is to partition the graph either on multiple devices of a single node or on multiple nodes of a distributed network. All the available frameworks for such architectures demand unconventional programming which is difficult and error prone. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for compilation of graph algorithms written in an intuitive graph domain-specific language, Falcon. The framework targets shared memory parallel architectures, computational accelerators and distributed architectures (CPU and GPU cluster). First, it analyses the abstract syntax tree (generated by Falcon) and gathers essential information. Subsequently, it generates optimized code in OpenCL for shared-memory parallel architectures and computational accelerators, and OpenCL coupled with MPI code for distributed architectures. Motivation behind generating OpenCL code is its platform-agnostic and vendor-agnostic behavior, i.e., it is portable to all kinds of devices. Our framework makes memory management, thread management, message passing, etc., transparent to the user. None of the available domain-specific languages, frameworks or parallel libraries handle portable implementations of graph algorithms. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the generated code performs comparably to the state-of-the-art non-portable implementations and hand-tuned implementations. The results also show portability and scalability of our framework.

Data analysis techniques can be useful in decision-making processes, when patterns of interest can indicate trends in specific domains. Such trends might support evaluation, definition of alternatives, or prediction of events. Currently, datasets have increased in size and complexity, posing challenges to modern hardware resources. In the case of large datasets that can be represented as graphs, issues of visualization and scalable processing are of current concern. Distributed frameworks are commonly used to deal with this data, but the deployment and the management of computational clusters can be complex, demanding technical and financial resources that can be prohibitive in several scenarios. Therefore, it is desirable to design efficient techniques for processing and visualization of large scale graphs that optimize hardware resources in a single computational node. In this course of action, we developed a visualization technique named StructMatrix to find interesting insights on real-life graphs. In addition, we proposed a graph processing framework M-Flash that used a novel, bimodal block processing strategy (BBP) to boost computation speed by minimizing I/O cost. Our results show that our visualization technique allows an efficient and interactive exploration of big graphs and our framework MFlash significantly outperformed all state-of-the-art approaches based on secondary memory. Our contributions have been validated in peer-review events demonstrating the potential of our finding in fostering the analytical possibilities related to large-graph data domains. / Técnicas de análise de dados podem ser úteis em processos de tomada de decisão, quando padrões de interesse indicam tendências em domínios específicos. Tais tendências podem auxiliar a avaliação, a definição de alternativas ou a predição de eventos. Atualmente, os conjuntos de dados têm aumentado em tamanho e complexidade, impondo desafios para recursos modernos de hardware. No caso de grandes conjuntos de dados que podem ser representados como grafos, aspectos de visualização e processamento escalável têm despertado interesse. Arcabouços distribuídos são comumente usados para lidar com esses dados, mas a implantação e o gerenciamento de clusters computacionais podem ser complexos, exigindo recursos técnicos e financeiros que podem ser proibitivos em vários cenários. Portanto é desejável conceber técnicas eficazes para o processamento e visualização de grafos em larga escala que otimizam recursos de hardware em um único nó computacional. Desse modo, este trabalho apresenta uma técnica de visualização chamada StructMatrix para identificar relacionamentos estruturais em grafos reais. Adicionalmente, foi proposta uma estratégia de processamento bimodal em blocos, denominada Bimodal Block Processing (BBP), que minimiza o custo de I/O para melhorar o desempenho do processamento. Essa estratégia foi incorporada a um arcabouço de processamento de grafos denominado M-Flash e desenvolvido durante a realização deste trabalho.Foram conduzidos experimentos a fim de avaliar as técnicas propostas. Os resultados mostraram que a técnica de visualização StructMatrix permitiu uma exploração eficiente e interativa de grandes grafos. Além disso, a avaliação do arcabouço M-Flash apresentou ganhos significativos sobre todas as abordagens baseadas em memória secundária do estado da arte. Ambas as contribuições foram validadas em eventos de revisão por pares, demonstrando o potencial analítico deste trabalho em domínios associados a grafos em larga escala.

Data analysis techniques can be useful in decision-making processes, when patterns of interest can indicate trends in specific domains. Such trends might support evaluation, definition of alternatives, or prediction of events. Currently, datasets have increased in size and complexity, posing challenges to modern hardware resources. In the case of large datasets that can be represented as graphs, issues of visualization and scalable processing are of current concern. Distributed frameworks are commonly used to deal with this data, but the deployment and the management of computational clusters can be complex, demanding technical and financial resources that can be prohibitive in several scenarios. Therefore, it is desirable to design efficient techniques for processing and visualization of large scale graphs that optimize hardware resources in a single computational node. In this course of action, we developed a visualization technique named StructMatrix to find interesting insights on real-life graphs. In addition, we proposed a graph processing framework M-Flash that used a novel, bimodal block processing strategy (BBP) to boost computation speed by minimizing I/O cost. Our results show that our visualization technique allows an efficient and interactive exploration of big graphs and our framework MFlash significantly outperformed all state-of-the-art approaches based on secondary memory. Our contributions have been validated in peer-review events demonstrating the potential of our finding in fostering the analytical possibilities related to large-graph data domains. / Técnicas de análise de dados podem ser úteis em processos de tomada de decisão, quando padrões de interesse indicam tendências em domínios específicos. Tais tendências podem auxiliar a avaliação, a definição de alternativas ou a predição de eventos. Atualmente, os conjuntos de dados têm aumentado em tamanho e complexidade, impondo desafios para recursos modernos de hardware. No caso de grandes conjuntos de dados que podem ser representados como grafos, aspectos de visualização e processamento escalável têm despertado interesse. Arcabouços distribuídos são comumente usados para lidar com esses dados, mas a implantação e o gerenciamento de clusters computacionais podem ser complexos, exigindo recursos técnicos e financeiros que podem ser proibitivos em vários cenários. Portanto é desejável conceber técnicas eficazes para o processamento e visualização de grafos em larga escala que otimizam recursos de hardware em um único nó computacional. Desse modo, este trabalho apresenta uma técnica de visualização chamada StructMatrix para identificar relacionamentos estruturais em grafos reais. Adicionalmente, foi proposta uma estratégia de processamento bimodal em blocos, denominada Bimodal Block Processing (BBP), que minimiza o custo de I/O para melhorar o desempenho do processamento. Essa estratégia foi incorporada a um arcabouço de processamento de grafos denominado M-Flash e desenvolvido durante a realização deste trabalho.Foram conduzidos experimentos a fim de avaliar as técnicas propostas. Os resultados mostraram que a técnica de visualização StructMatrix permitiu uma exploração eficiente e interativa de grandes grafos. Além disso, a avaliação do arcabouço M-Flash apresentou ganhos significativos sobre todas as abordagens baseadas em memória secundária do estado da arte. Ambas as contribuições foram validadas em eventos de revisão por pares, demonstrando o potencial analítico deste trabalho em domínios associados a grafos em larga escala.