An Experimental Comparison of Pregel-like Graph Processing Systems

The introduction of Google’s Pregel generated much interest in the field of large-scale graph data processing, inspiring the development of Pregel-like systems such as Apache Giraph, GPS, Mizan, and GraphLab, all of which have appeared in the past two years. To gain an understanding of how Pregel-like systems perform, we conduct a study to experimentally compare Giraph, GPS, Mizan, and GraphLab on equal ground by considering graph and algorithm agnostic optimizations and by using several metrics. The systems are compared with four different algorithms (PageRank, single source shortest path, weakly connected components, and distributed minimum spanning tree) on up to 128 Amazon EC2 machines. We find that the system optimizations present in Giraph and GraphLab allow them to perform well. Our evaluation also shows Giraph 1.0.0’s considerable improvement since Giraph 0.1 and identifies areas of improvement for all systems.