The Knowledge Discovery Toolbox (KDT) enables domain experts to perform complex analyses of huge datasets on supercomputers using a high-level language without grappling with the difficulties of writing parallel code, calling parallel libraries, or becoming a graph expert. KDT provides a flexible Python interface to a small set of high-level graph operations; composing a few of these operations is often sufficient for a specific analysis. Scalability and performance are delivered by linking to a state-of-the-art back-end compute engine that scales from laptops to large HPC clusters. KDT delivers very competitive performance from a generalpurpose, reusable library for graphs on the order of 10 billion edges and greater. We demonstrate speedup of 1 and 2 orders of magnitude over PBGL and Pegasus, respectively, on some tasks. Examples from simple use cases and key graphanalytic benchmarks illustrate the productivity and performance realized by KDT users. Semantic graph abstractions provide both flexibility and high performance for real-world use cases. Graph-algorithm researchers benefit from the ability to develop algorithms quickly using KDT's graph and underlying matrix abstractions for distributed memory. KDT is available as open-source code to foster experimentation.

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Automatic measurement of semantic text similarity is an important task in natural language processing. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of different vector space models to perform this task. We address the real-world problem of modeling patent-to-patent similarity and compare TFIDF (and related extensions), topic models (e.g., latent semantic indexing), and neural models (e.g., paragraph vectors). Contrary to expectations, the added computational cost of text embedding methods is justified only when: 1) the target text is condensed; and 2) the similarity comparison is trivial. Otherwise, TFIDF performs surprisingly well in other cases: in particular for longer and more technical texts or for making finer-grained distinctions between nearest neighbors. Unexpectedly, extensions to the TFIDF method, such as adding noun phrases or calculating term weights incrementally, were not helpful in our context.

Execution of complex analytic queries on massive semantic graphs is a challenging problem in big-data analytics that requires high-performance parallel computing. In a semantic graph, vertices and edges carry attributes of various types and the analytic queries typically depend on the values of these attributes. Thus, the computation must view the graph through a filter that passes only those individual vertices and edges of interest. Previous investigations have developed Knowledge Discovery Toolbox (KDT), a sophisticated a Python library for parallel graph computations. In KDT, the user can write custom graph algorithms by specifying operations between edges and vertices (semiring operations). The user can also customize existing graph algorithms by writing filters. Although the high-level language for this customization enables domain scientists to productively express their graph analytics requirements, the customized queries perform poorly due to the overhead of having to call into the Python virtual machine for each vertex and edge.In this work, we use the Selective Embedded Just-In-Time Specialization (SEJITS) approach to automatically translate semiring operations and filters defined by programmers into a lower-level efficiency language, bypassing the upcall into Python. We evaluate our approach by comparing it with the high-performance Combinatorial BLAS engine and show that our approach combines the benefits of programming in a highlevel language with executing in a low-level parallel environment. We increase the system's flexibility by developing techniques that provide users with the ability to define new vertex and edge types from Python.We also present a new Roofline model for graph traversals and show that we achieve performance that is significantly closer to the bounds suggested by the Roofline. Finally, to further understand the complex interaction with the underlying architecture, we present an analysis using performance counters that quantifies the improvement in hardware behavior in the context our SEJITS methodology. Overall, we demonstrate the first known solution to the problem of obtaining high performance from a productivity language when applying graph algorithms selectively on semantic graphs with hundreds of millions of edges and scaling to thousands of processors for graphs.

Abstract-High performance is a crucial consideration when executing a complex analytic query on a massive semantic graph. In a semantic graph, vertices and edges carry attributes of various types. Analytic queries on semantic graphs typically depend on the values of these attributes; thus, the computation must view the graph through a filter that passes only those individual vertices and edges of interest.Knowledge Discovery Toolbox (KDT), a Python library for parallel graph computations, is customizable in two ways. First, the user can write custom graph algorithms by specifying operations between edges and vertices. These programmer-specified operations are called semiring operations due to KDT's underlying linear-algebraic abstractions. Second, the user can customize existing graph algorithms by writing filters that return true for those vertices and edges the user wants to retain during algorithm execution. For high productivity, both semiring operations and filters are written in a high-level language, resulting in relatively low performance due to the bottleneck of having to call into the Python virtual machine for each vertex and edge.In this work, we use the Selective Embedded JIT Specialization (SEJITS) approach to automatically translate semiring operations and filters defined by programmers into a lower-level efficiency language, bypassing the upcall into Python. We evaluate our approach by comparing it with the high-performance Combinatorial BLAS engine, and show our approach enables users to write in high-level languages and still obtain the high performance of low-level code. We also present a new roofline model for graph traversals, and show that our high-performance implementations do not significantly deviate from the roofline. Overall, we demonstrate the first known solution to the problem of obtaining high performance from a productivity language when applying graph algorithms selectively on semantic graphs.