[GIRAPH-11] Improve the graph distribution of Giraph

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.1.0
• Fix Version/s: 0.1.0
• Assignee: Avery Ching
• Reporter: Avery Ching
• Created: 29/Aug/11 03:05
• Updated: 31/Jan/12 23:26
• Resolved: 15/Nov/11 01:06

Description

Currently, Giraph assumes that the data from the VertexInputFormat is sorted. If the user data is not sorted by the vertex id, they must first run a MapReduce or Pig job to generate a sorted dataset. This is often a bit inconvenient.

Giraph graph partitioning is currently range based and there are some advantages and disadvantages of this approach. The proposal of this JIRA would be to allow for both range and hash based partitioning and provide more flexibility to the user.

Design goals for the graph distribution:

• Allow vertices to be unordered or unordered
• Ability to repartition
• Select the partitioning scheme based on user needs (i.e. hash or range based)
• Ability to provide user-specific hints about partitions

Hash-based partitioning

• Good vertex balancing across ranges for random data
• Bad at vertex id locality

Range-based partitioning

• Good at vertex id locality
• Ability to split ranges easily
• Can cause hotspots for hot ranges

Issue Links

• is related to: GIRAPH-68 Implement a Graph Generator