A million edge drawing for a fistful of dollars

Abstract

In this paper we study the problem of designing a graph drawing algorithm for large graphs. The algorithm must be simple to implement and the computing infrastructure must not require major hardware or software investments. We report about the experimental analysis of a simple implementation of a spring embedder in Giraph, a vertex-centric open source framework for distributed computing. The algorithm is tested on real graphs of up to 1 million edges by using a cheap PaaS (Platform as a Service) infrastructure of Amazon. We can afford drawing graphs with about one million edges in about 8 min, by spending less than 1 USD per drawing for the cloud computing infrastructure.