Mitigating I/O latency in SSD-based graph traversal

Mining large graphs has now become an important aspect of many applications. Recent interest in low cost graph traversal on single machines has lead to the construction of systems that use solid state drives (SSDs) to store the graph. An SSD can be accessed with far lower latency than magnetic media, while remaining cheaper than main memory. Unfortunately SSDs are slower than main memory and algorithms running on such systems are hampered by large IO latencies when accessing the SSD. In this paper we present two novel techniques to reduce the impact of SSD IO latency on semi-external memory graph traversal. We introduce a variant of the Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) format that we call Compressed Enumerated Encoded Sparse Offset Row (CEESOR). CEESOR is particularly efficient for graphs with hierarchical structure and can reduce the space required to represent connectivity information by amounts varying from 5% to as much as 76%. CEESOR allows a larger number of edges to be moved for each unit of IO transfer from the SSD to main memory and more effective use of operating system caches. Our second contribution is a runtime prefetching technique that exploits the ability of solid state drives to service multiple random access requests in parallel. We present a novel Run Along SSD Prefetcher (RASP). RASP is capable of hiding the effect of IO latency in single threaded graph traversal in breadth-first and shorted path order to the extent that it improves iteration time for large graphs by amounts varying from 2.6X-6X.