[Colloquium] Reminder: Yang/MS Presentation/Apr 24, 2015

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is a reminder about Fan's MS Presentation tomorrow.

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Date:  Friday, April 24, 2015

Time:  2:30 PM

Place:  Ryerson 277

M.S. Candidate:  Fan Yang

M.S. Paper Title: Systematic Understanding of Graph Computation
Behavior to Enable Robust Benchmarking

Abstract:
Graph processing is widely recognized as important for a growing range
of applications, including social network analysis, machine learning,
data mining, and web search. Recently, many performance assessments
and comparative studies of graph computation have been published, all
of which employ highly varied ensembles of algorithms and graphs. To
explore the robustness of these studies, we characterize how behavior
varies across a variety of graph algorithms (graph analytics,
clustering, collaborative filtering, etc.) on a diverse collection of
graphs (size and degree distribution). Our results show that graph
computation behaviors, with up to 1000-fold variation, form a very
broad space, and inefficient exploration of this space may lead to a
narrow understanding of graph processing performance, or worse
misleading conclusions.

Hence, we consider how to construct a high-quality benchmark set,
which employs as few experiments as possible, and exhibit a wide range
of graph computation behavior. We study different ensembles of
graph-algorithm pairs, and define two metrics, spread and coverage, to
quantify how efficiently and completely an ensemble explores the
space. Our results show that: (1) an ensemble limited to a single
algorithms or a single graph may unfairly characterize a
graph-processing system, (2) an ensemble exploring both algorithm
diversity and graph diversity improves the quality significantly (30%
better coverage and 200% better spread), but must be carefully chosen,
(3) some specific algorithms are more useful than others for exploring
the space, and (4) it is possible to reduce benchmarking complexity
(i.e. number of algorithms, graphs, etc.) while conserving the
benchmarking quality.

Fan's advisor is Prof. Andrew Chien

Login to the Computer Science Department website for details:
 https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/phd/ms_announcements#fanyang

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Margaret P. Jaffey            margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)               (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago      http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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