A Distributed Force-Directed Algorithm on Giraph: Design and Experiments

In this paper we study the problem of designing a distributed graph visualization algorithm for large graphs. The algorithm must be simple to implement and the computing infrastructure must not require major hardware or software investments. We design, implement, and experiment a force-directed algorithm in Giraph, a popular open source framework for distributed computing, based on a vertex-centric design paradigm. The algorithm is tested both on real and artificial graphs with up to million edges, by using a rather inexpensive PaaS (Platform as a Service) infrastructure of Amazon. The experiments show the scalability and effectiveness of our technique when compared to a centralized implementation of the same force-directed model. We show that graphs with about one million edges can be drawn in less than 8 minutes, by spending about 1\$ per drawing in the cloud computing infrastructure.