GRAPHONE: A Data Store for Real-time Analytics on Evolving Graphs

There is a growing need to perform a diverse set of real-time analytics (batch and stream analytics) on evolving graphs to deliver the values of big data to users. The key requirement from such applications is to have a data store to support their diverse data access efficiently, while concurrently ingesting fine-grained updates at a high velocity. Unfortunately, current graph systems, either graph databases or analytics engines, are not designed to achieve high performance for both operations; rather, they excel in one area that keeps a private data store in a specialized way to favor their operations only. To address this challenge, we have designed and developed GRAPHONE, a graph data store that abstracts the graph data store away from the specialized systems to solve the fundamental research problems associated with the data store design. It combines two complementary graph storage formats (edge list and adjacency list) and uses dual versioning to decouple graph computations from updates. Importantly, it presents a new data abstraction, GraphView, to enable data access at two different granularities of data ingestions (called data visibility) for concurrent execution of diverse classes of real-time graph analytics with only a small data duplication. Experimental results show that GRAPHONE is able to deliver 11.40x and 5.36x average speedup in ingestion rate against LLAMA and Stinger, the two state-of-the-art dynamic graph systems, respectively. Further, they achieve an average speedup of 8.75x and 4.14x against LLAMA and 12.80x and 3.18x against Stinger for BFS and PageRank analytics (batch version), respectively. GRAPHONE also gains over 2,000x speedup against Kickstarter, a state-of-the-art stream analytics engine in ingesting the streaming edges and performing streaming BPS when treating first half as a base snapshot and rest as streaming edge in a synthetic graph. GRAPHONE also achieves an ingestion rate of two to three orders of magnitude higher than graph databases. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to run concurrent stream analytics from the same data store.