Main memory evaluation of recursive queries on multicore machines

Supporting iteration and/or recursion for advanced big data analytics requires reexamination of classical algorithms on modern computing environments. Several recent studies have focused on the implementation of transitive closure in multi-node clusters. Algorithms that deliver optimal performance on multi-node clusters are hardly optimal on multicore machines. We present an experimental study on finding efficient main memory recursive query evaluation algorithms on modern multi-core machines. We review SEMINAIVE, SMART and a pair of single-source closure (SSC) algorithms. We also propose a new hybrid SSC algorithm, named SSC12, which combines two previously known SSC algorithms. We implement these algorithms on a multicore shared memory machine, and compare their memory utilization, speed and scalability on synthetic and real-life datasets. Our experiments show that, on multicore machines, the surprisingly simple SSC12 is the only transitive-closure algorithm that is consistently fast and memory-efficient on all test graphs.