Skew-Resistant Graph Partitioning

Large graph datasets have caused renewed interest for graph partitioning. However, existing well-studied graph partitioners often assume that vertices of the graph are always active during the computation, which may lead to time-varying skewness for traversal-style graph workloads, like Breadth First Search, since they only explore part of the graph in each superstep. Additionally, existing solutions do not consider what vertices each partition will have, as a result, high-degree vertices may be concentrated into a few partitions, causing imbalance. Towards this, we introduce the idea of skew-resistant graph partitioning, where the objective is to create an initial partitioning that will "hold well" over time without suffering from skewness. Skew-resistant graph partitioning tries to mitigate skewness by taking the characteristics of both the target workload and the graph structure into consideration.