Performance Analysis of Spark/GraphX on POWER8 Cluster

POWER 8, the latest RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) microprocessor of the IBM Power architecture family, was designed to significantly benefit emerging workloads, including Business Analytics, Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing. In this paper, we provide a thorough performance evaluation on a widely used large-scale graph processing framework, Spark/GraphX, on a POWER 8 cluster. Note that we use Spark and Java versions out of the box without any optimization. We examine the performance with several important graph kernels such as Breadth-First Search, Connected Components, and PageRank using both large real-world social graphs and synthetic graphs of billions of edges. We study the Spark/GraphX performance against some architectural aspects and perform the first Spark/GraphX scalability test with up to 16 POWER 8 nodes.