Laxman Dhulipala
I am research scientist at Google Research with the Graph Mining team and also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park.
I am broadly interested in efficient parallel algorithms, e.g., for parallel clustering and parallel graph processing. I am also interested in models of parallel computation motivated by emerging hardware and exploring these models theoretically and practically.
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We introduceTeraHAC, a (1+epsilon)-approximate hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithm whichs cales to trillion-edge graphs. Our algorithm is based on a new approach to computing (1+epsilon)-approximate HAC, which is a novel combination of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm and the notion of (1+epsilon)-approximate HAC. Our approach allows us to partition the graph among multiple machines and make significant progress in computing the clustering within each partition before any communication with other partitions is needed.We evaluate TeraHAC on a number of real-world and synthetic graphs of up to 8 trillion edges. We show that TeraHAC requires over 100x fewer rounds compared to previously known approaches for computing HAC. It is up to 8.3x faster than SCC, the state-of-the-art distributed algorithm for hierarchical clustering, while achieving 1.16x higher quality. In fact, TeraHAC essentially retains the quality of the celebrated HAC algorithm while significantly improving the running time.
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Obtaining scalable algorithms for hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) is of significant interest due to the massive size of real-world datasets. At the same time, efficiently parallelizing HAC is difficult due to the seemingly sequential nature of the algorithm. In this paper, we address this issue and present ParHAC, the first efficient parallel HAC algorithm with sublinear depth for the widely-used average-linkage function. In particular, we provide a
(1+ϵ)-approximation algorithm for this problem on m edge graphs using O(m polylog m)
work and poly-logarithmic depth. Moreover, we show that obtaining similar bounds for exact average-linkage HAC is not possible under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions. We complement our theoretical results with a comprehensive study of the ParHAC algorithm in terms of its scalability, performance, and quality, and compare with several state-of-the-art sequential and parallel baselines. On a broad set of large publicly-available real-world datasets, we find that ParHAC obtains a 50.1x speedup on average over the best sequential baseline, while achieving quality similar to the exact HAC algorithm. We also show that ParHAC can cluster one of the largest publicly available graph datasets with 124 billion edges in a little over three hours using a commodity multicore machine.
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Parallel Graph Algorithms in Constant Adaptive Rounds: Theory meets Practice
Soheil Behnezhad
Warren J Schudy
VLDB 2020
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We study fundamental graph problems such as graph connectivity, minimum spanning forest (MSF), and approximate maximum (weight) matching in a distributed setting. In particular, we focus on the Adaptive Massively Parallel Computation (AMPC) model, which is a theoretical model that captures MapReduce-like computation augmented with a distributed hash table.
We show the first AMPC algorithms for all of the studied problems that run in a constant number of rounds and use only O(n^ϵ) space per machine, where 0<ϵ<1. Our results improve both upon the previous results in the AMPC model, as well as the best-known results in the MPC model, which is the theoretical model underpinning many popular distributed computation frameworks, such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Beam, Pregel and Giraph.
Finally, we provide an empirical comparison of the algorithms in the MPC and AMPC models in a fault-tolerant distriubted computation environment. We empirically evaluate our algorithms on a set of large real-world graphs and show that our AMPC algorithms can achieve improvements in both running time and round-complexity over optimized MPC baselines.
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