Apache Spark Graph Processing

Book Description:

Apache Spark is the next standard of open-source cluster-computing engine for processing big data. Many practical computing problems concern large graphs, like the Web graph and various social networks. The scale of these graphs – in some cases billions of vertices, trillions of edges – poses challenges to their efficient processing. Apache Spark GraphX API combines the advantages of both data-parallel and graph-parallel systems by efficiently expressing graph computation within the Spark data-parallel framework.

This book will teach the user to do graphical programming in Apache Spark, apart from an explanation of the entire process of graphical data analysis. You will journey through the creation of graphs, its uses, its exploration and analysis and finally will also cover the conversion of graph elements into graph structures.

This book begins with an introduction of the Spark system, its libraries and the Scala Build Tool. Using a hands-on approach, this book will quickly teach you how to install and leverage Spark interactively on the command line and in a standalone Scala program. Then, it presents all the methods for building Spark graphs using illustrative network datasets. Next, it will walk you through the process of exploring, visualizing and analyzing different network characteristics. This book will also teach you how to transform raw datasets into a usable form. In addition, you will learn powerful operations that can be used to transform graph elements and graph structures. Furthermore, this book also teaches how to create custom graph operations that are tailored for specific needs with efficiency in mind. The later chapters of this book cover more advanced topics such as clustering graphs, implementing graph-parallel iterative algorithms and learning methods from graph data.