Distributed landmark labeling for social networks

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2025.105057

Distance queries are a fundamental part of many network analysis applications. They can be used to infer the closeness of two users in social networks, the relation between two sites in a web graph, or the importance of the interaction between two proteins or molecules. Being able to answer these queries rapidly has many benefits in the area of network analysis. Pruned Landmark Labeling (PLL) is a technique used to generate an index for a given graph that allows the shortest path queries to be completed in a fraction of the time when compared to a standard breadth-first or a depth-first search-based algorithm. Parallel Shortest-distance Labeling (PSL) reorganizes the steps of PLL for the multithreaded setting and is designed particularly for social networks for which the index sizes can be much larger than what a single server can store. Even for a medium-size, 5 million vertex graph, the index size can be more than 40 GB. This paper proposes a hybrid, shared- and distributed-memory algorithm, DPSL, by partitioning the input graph via a vertex separator. The proposed method improves both the parallel execution time and the maximum memory consumption by distributing both the data and the work across multiple nodes of a cluster. For instance, on a graph with 5M vertices and 150M edges, using 4 nodes, DPSL reduces the execution time and maximum memory consumption by 2.13× and 1.87×, respectively, compared to our improved implementation of PSL.