Distributed Subgraph Enumeration via Backtracking-based Framework

Given a small pattern graph and a large data graph, the task of subgraph enumeration is to find all subgraphs of the data graph that are isomorphic to the pattern graph. When the data graph is dynamic, the task of continuous subgraph enumeration is to detect the changes in the matching results caused by the edge updates at each time step. The two tasks are fundamental in many graph analysis applications. The state-of-the-art distributed methods solve them via distributed multi-way join. However, they are inefficient in communication since they have to shuffle partial matching results during the join. The partial matching results may be much larger than the data graph itself. To overcome the drawback, we develop the BENU framework for distributed subgraph enumeration. Given a data graph, BENU generates a group of local search tasks that follow a backtracking-based execution plan to enumerate subgraphs of the pattern graph. BENU executes the tasks in parallel. The tasks query the data graph stored in a distributed database on demand, avoid shuffling partial matching results. To handle dynamic data graphs, we propose the concept of incremental pattern graphs. We solve the continuous subgraph enumeration via enumerating incremental pattern graphs in the data graph snapshots at each time step. We extend BENU into S-BENU to enumerate them efficiently. We develop implementations for BENU and S-BENU with two optimization techniques. The extensive experiments show that BENU and S-BENU are scalable. They outperform the state-of-the-art by up to one and two orders of magnitude, respectively.