A distributed approach for graph-oriented multidimensional analysis

The importance of graphs as the fundamental structure underpinning many real world applications is no longer to be proved. Large graphs have emerged in various fields such as biological, social and transportation networks. The sheer volume of these networks poses challenges to traditional techniques for storage and analysis of graph data. In particular, OLAP analysis requires access to large portions of data to extract key information and to feed strategic decision making. OLAP provides multilevel, multiperspective views of the data. Most of the current techniques are optimized for centralized graph processing. A distributed approach providing horizontal scalability is required in order to handle the analysis workload. In this paper, we focus on applying OLAP analysis on large, distributed graph data. We describe Distributed Graph Cube, our distributed framework for graph-based OLAP cubes computation and aggregation. Experimental results on large, real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms its centralized counterparts. We also evaluate the performance of both Hadoop and Spark for distributed cubes computations.