Distributed GraphLab: a framework for machine learning and data mining in the cloud
Hui Miao - University of Maryland at College Park
Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 1:00-2:00 pm 
Abstract
Authors:
Yucheng Low, Danny Bickson, Joseph Gonzalez, Carlos Guestrin, Aapo Kyrola, Joseph M. Hellerstein
Venue:
VLDB 2012
Abstract:
While high-level data parallel frameworks, like MapReduce, simplify the design and implementation of large-scale data processing systems, they do not naturally or efficiently support many important data mining and machine learning algorithms and can lead to inefficient learning systems. To help fill this critical void, we introduced the GraphLab abstraction which naturally expresses asynchronous, dynamic, graph-parallel computation while ensuring data consistency and achieving a high degree of parallel performance in the shared-memory setting. In this paper, we extend the GraphLab framework to the substantially more challenging distributed setting while preserving strong data consistency guarantees.
We develop graph based extensions to pipelined locking and data versioning to reduce network congestion and mitigate the effect of network latency. We also introduce fault tolerance to the GraphLab abstraction using the classic Chandy-Lamport snapshot algorithm and demonstrate how it can be easily implemented by exploiting the GraphLab abstraction itself. Finally, we evaluate our distributed implementation of the GraphLab abstraction on a large Amazon EC2 deployment and show 1-2 orders of magnitude performance gains over Hadoop-based implementations.
This talk is organized by Abdul Quamar