Balanced graph partitioning with apache spark

A significant part of the data produced every day by online services is structured as a graph. Therefore, there is the need for efficient processing and analysis solutions for large scale graphs. Among the others, the balanced graph partitioning is a well known NP-complete problem with a wide range of applications. Several solutions have been proposed so far, however most of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms are not directly applicable in very large-scale distributed scenarios. A recently proposed promising alternative exploits a vertex-center heuristics to solve the balance graph partitioning problem. Their algorithm is massively parallel: there is no central coordination, and each node is processed independently. Unfortunately, we found such algorithm to be not directly exploitable in current BSP-like distributed programming frameworks. In this paper we present the adaptations we applied to the original algorithm while implementing it on Spark, a state-of-the-art distributed framework for data processing.