Optimizing declarative graph queries at large scale

Abstract

This paper presents GraphRex, an efficient, robust, scalable, and easy-to-program framework for graph processing on datacenter infrastructure. To users, GraphRex presents a declarative, Datalog-like interface that is natural and expressive. Underneath, it compiles those queries into efficient implementations. A key technical contribution of GraphRex is the identification and optimization of a set of global operators whose efficiency is crucial to the good performance of datacenter-based, large graph analysis. Our experimental results show that GraphRex significantly outperforms existing frameworks-both high- and low-level-in scenarios ranging across a wide variety of graph workloads and network conditions, sometimes by two orders of magnitude.