The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has awarded a grant to a big data project at EPFL’s Operating Systems Laboratory (LABOS). Entitled “Building Flexible Large-Graph Processing Systems on Commodity Hardware”, the project aims to advance the state of the art in graph processing.

A great variety of information is naturally encoded as graphs. Large graphs are present in social networks as well as many other applications, including biology, forensics and logistics. Yet many first-generation graph processing systems are inflexible, restricting users to a particular environment and computation on static graphs.

The LABOS researchers, led by Willy Zwaenepoel, will build on their earlier work on out-of-core graph processing systems. Their project will involve building systems that scale gracefully between memory and storage and are capable of dealing with dynamic graphs. The research team also intends to further optimize out-of-core performance, in terms of both performance and capacity.