As the amounts of collected data and computing power grow (multicore, GPUs, clusters, clouds), modern datasets no longer fit into one computing node. Efficient distributed parallel algorithms for handling large-scale data are required. The GraphLab framework is a parallel programming abstraction targeted for sparse iterative graph algorithms. GraphLab provides a programming interface, allowing deployment of distributed machine learning algorithms.[3] The main design considerations behind the design of GraphLab are:
Sparse data with local dependencies
Iterative algorithms
Potentially asynchronous execution
GraphLab toolkits
On top of GraphLab, several implemented libraries of algorithms:
Topic modeling - contains applications like LDA, which can be used to cluster documents and extract topical representations.[4]
Graph analytics - contains applications like pagerank and triangle counting, which can be applied to general graphs to estimate community structure.[5]
Graphical models - contains tools for making joint predictions about collections of related random variables.[8]
Computer vision - contains a collection of tools for reasoning about images.[9]
Turi
Turi (formerly called Dato and before that GraphLab Inc.) is a company that was founded by Prof. Carlos Guestrin from University of Washington in May 2013 to continue development support of the GraphLab open source project. Dato Inc. raised a $6.75M Series A from Madrona Venture Group and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). They raised a $18.5M Series B from Vulcan Capital and Opus Capital, with participation from Madrona and NEA.[10] On August 5, 2016, Turi was acquired by Apple Inc. for $200,000,000.[11][12]
References
^Joseph Gonzalez, Yucheng Low, Haijie Gu, Danny Bickson, Carlos Guestrin (2012). "PowerGraph: Distributed Graph-Parallel Computation on Natural Graphs." Proceedings of Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).
^Yucheng Low, Joseph Gonzalez, Aapo Kyrola, Danny Bickson, Carlos Guestrin and Joseph M. Hellerstein (2012). "Distributed GraphLab: A Framework for Machine Learning and Data Mining in the Cloud." Proceedings of Very Large Data Bases (PVLDB).
^Y. Low, J. Gonzalez, A. Kyrola, D. Bickson, C. Guestrin and J. Hellerstein. GraphLab: A New Framework for Parallel Machine Learning. In the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Catalina Island, USA, 2010