Flash: A Framework for Programming Distributed Graph Processing Algorithms

As a result of decades of studies, a broad spectrum of graph algorithms have been developed for graph analytics, including clustering, centrality, traversal, matching, mining, etc. However, the majority of recent graph processing frameworks only focus on a handful of fix-point graph algorithms such as breadth-first search, PageRank, shortest path, etc. It leaves the distributed computation of a large variety of graph algorithms suffering from low efficiency, limited expressiveness, or high implementation complexity with existing frameworks.

In this paper, we propose FLASH, a framework for programming distributed graph processing algorithms, which achieves good expressiveness, productivity and efficiency at the same time. Thanks to its high-level interface, FLASH allows users to implement complex distributed graph algorithms with high performance with only a few lines of code. We have implemented 72 graph algorithms for 49 different problems in FLASH. In further evaluations, we found that FLASH beats other state-ofthe-art graph processing frameworks with the speedups of up to 2 orders of magnitudes while takes up to 92% less lines of code.