Publications

Streaming data analytics via message passing with application to graph algorithms

Plimpton, Steven J.; Shead, Tim

The need to process streaming data, which arrives continuously at high-volume in real-time, arises in a variety of contexts including data produced by experiments, collections of environmental or network sensors, and running simulations. Streaming data can also be formulated as queries or transactions which operate on a large dynamic data store, e.g. a distributed database. We describe a lightweight, portable framework named PHISH which provides a communication model enabling a set of independent processes to compute on a stream of data in a distributed-memory parallel manner. Datums are routed between processes in patterns defined by the application. PHISH provides multiple communication backends including MPI and sockets/ZMQ. The former means streaming computations can be run on any parallel machine which supports MPI; the latter allows them to run on a heterogeneous, geographically dispersed network of machines. We illustrate how streaming MapReduce operations can be implemented using the PHISH communication model, and describe streaming versions of three algorithms for large, sparse graph analytics: triangle enumeration, sub-graph isomorphism matching, and connected component finding. We also provide benchmark timings comparing MPI and socket performance for several kernel operations useful in streaming algorithms. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.