Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The GraphLab Workshop - Why Should You Care?

Everyone knows that one of the hottest topics today is big data analytics. The GraphLab workshop is a "trade show" for all the significant graph analytics and graph database solutions. In one day you could learn more about the following systems (a preliminary list!):

Featured Projects

	Google’s Pregel is their Bulk Synchronous graph framework. Prof. Vahab Mirrokni is going to give an oral talk about graph processing @ Google.
	Apache Giraph is the open source equivalent system to Google’s Pregel. Dr. Avery Ching, one of Giraph contributors, will give a talk about large scale graph processing @ Facebook.
	Dr. Pankaj Gupta, the creator of Cassovary Graph Processing system @ Twitter will give a talk about Who To Follow (WTF) service in Twitter.
	Naiad is a parallel data flow framework from Microsoft with the focus of incremental computation. Dr. Derek Murray from Microsoft Research will present Naiad.
	Intel GraphBuilder is a software for creating graphs out of raw data, utilizing Hadoop for parallel graph creation. Dr. Theodore Willke from Intel Labs will present Intel Labs work in this domain.
	GraphLab is CMU+UW open source graph processing system, which supports both bulk synchronous parallel as well as asynchronous computation. Prof. Carlos Guestrin will present the latest GraphLab project.
	Allegro Graph is a high performance graph database with RDF support. Jans Aasman, the CEO of Franz, will give a demo of their newest graph database.
	Combinatorial BLAS is a distributed memory parallel graph library from LBNL/UCSB. Dr. Aydin Buluc will present comb-BLAS.
	Grappa is a distributed graph processing framework using commodity processors, from The University of Washington. Prof. Mark Oskin will present Grappa.
	Presto is a distributed framework for speeding up R computations by HP Labs. Shivaram Venkataraman from Bekreley and Kyungyong Lee will present Persto.
	Titan is a distributed graph database. Dr. Matthias Broecheler will present Titan.
	Neo4j is an open source distributed graph database in Java. Alex Averbuch from neo4j will present neo4j.
	Infinite Graph from Objectivity is a distributed graph database.
	DEX is a high performance and scalable graph database system. Norbert Martinez will present DEX.
	YarcData, a Cray spinoff is creating customized hardware solutions for ultra fast graph processing.
	Systap LLC is a startup working on speeding up graph algorithms using GPUs. Bryan Thompson from Systap will present preliminary results of applying the gather apply scatter model on GPU.
	Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC), a new EU FP7 project that aims to establish industry cooperation on graph database benchmarks, benchmark practices and benchmark results. Dr. Alex Averbuch (Neo Technologies), Norbert Martinez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) and Dr. Andrey Gubichev (Technical University of Munich) will present LDBC.

Other notable talks at the GraphLab workshop:

	Trifacta is the hottest bay area startup out there, started by Prof. Joe Hellerstein from Berkeley and Prof. Jefferey Heer from Stanford. Prof. Joe Hellerstein will talk about Productivity for Data Analysts: Visualization, Intelligence and Scale.
	Dr. Lei Tang from Walmart Labs will talk about adaptive user segmentation for collaborative filtering.
	Alpine Data Labs is a Greenplum spinoff focusing on big data analytics. Seven Hillion will describe a case study of big data analytics on top of Hadoop.