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Memory disaggregation (MD) allows for scalable and elastic data center design by separating compute (CPU) from memory. With MD, compute and memory are no longer coupled into the same server box. Instead, they are connected to each other via ultra-fast networking such as RDMA. MD can bring many advantages, e.g., higher memory utilization, better independent scaling (of compute and memory), and lower cost of ownership. This paper makes the case that MD can fuel the next wave of innovation on database systems. We observe that MD revives the great debate of shared what in the database community. We envision thatdistributed shared-memory databases (DSM-DB, for short)- that have not received much attention before - can be promising in the future with MD. We present a list of challenges and opportunities that can inspire next steps in system design making the case for DSM-DB.

 

Finding from a big graph those subgraphs that satisfy certain conditions is useful in many applications such as community detection and subgraph matching. These problems have a high time complexity, but existing systems that attempt to scale them are all IO-bound in execution. We propose the first truly CPU-bound distributed framework called G-thinker for subgraph finding algorithms, which adopts a task-based computation model, and which also provides a user-friendly subgraph-centric vertex-pulling API for writing distributed subgraph finding algorithms that can be easily adapted from existing serial algorithms. To utilize all CPU cores of a cluster, G-thinker features (1) a highly concurrent vertex cache for parallel task access and (2) a lightweight task scheduling approach that ensures high task throughput. These designs well overlap communication with computation to minimize the idle time of CPU cores. To further improve load balancing on graphs where the workloads of individual tasks can be drastically different due to biased graph density distribution, we propose to prioritize the scheduling of those tasks that tend to be long running for processing and decomposition, plus a timeout mechanism for task decomposition to prevent long-running straggler tasks. The idea has been integrated into a novelty algorithm for maximum clique finding (MCF) that adopts a hybrid task decomposition strategy, which significantly improves the running time of MCF on dense and large graphs: The algorithm finds a maximum clique of size 1,109 on a large and dense WikiLinks graph dataset in 70 minutes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that G-thinker achieves orders of magnitude speedup compared even with the fastest existing subgraph-centric system, and it scales well to much larger and denser real network data. G-thinker is open-sourced at http://bit.ly/gthinker with detailed documentation. 

Given a user-specified minimum degree threshold γ, a γ-quasi-clique is a subgraph g = (Vg, Eg) where each vertex ν ∈ Vg connects to at least γ fraction of the other vertices (i.e., ⌈γ · (|Vg|- 1)⌉ vertices) in g. Quasi-clique is one of the most natural definitions for dense structures useful in finding communities in social networks and discovering significant biomolecule structures and pathways. However, mining maximal quasi-cliques is notoriously expensive. In this paper, we design parallel algorithms for mining maximal quasi-cliques on G-thinker, a distributed graph mining framework that decomposes mining into compute-intensive tasks to fully utilize CPU cores. We found that directly using G-thinker results in the straggler problem due to (i) the drastic load imbalance among different tasks and (ii) the difficulty of predicting the task running time. We address these challenges by redesigning G-thinker's execution engine to prioritize long-running tasks for execution, and by utilizing a novel timeout strategy to effectively decompose long-running tasks to improve load balancing. While this system redesign applies to many other expensive dense subgraph mining problems, this paper verifies the idea by adapting the state-of-the-art quasi-clique algorithm, Quick, to our redesigned G-thinker. Extensive experiments verify that our new solution scales well with the number of CPU cores, achieving 201× runtime speedup when mining a graph with 3.77M vertices and 16.5M edges in a 16-node cluster. 

Many computationally expensive problems are solved by a divide-and-conquer algorithm: a problem over a big dataset can be recursively divided into independent tasks over smaller subsets of the dataset. We present a distributed general-purpose framework called T-thinker which effectively utilizes the CPU cores in a cluster by properly decomposing an expensive problem into smaller independent tasks for parallel computation. T-thinker well overlaps CPU processing with network communication, and its superior performance is verified over a re-engineered graph mining system G-thinker available at http://cs.uab.edu/yanda/gthinker/