Benchmarking Big Data Systems: Performance and Decision-Making Implications in Emerging Technologies

Systems for graph processing are a key enabler for insights from large-scale graphs that are critical to many new advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and blockchain. In this study, we benchmark another two widely utilized graph processing systems, Apache Spark GraphX and Apache Fink, concerning the key performance criterion by means of response time, scalability, and computational complexity. We demonstrate our results which show the capability of each system for real-world graph applications, and hence, providing a quantitative understanding to select the system for our purpose. GraphX’s strength was in processing batch in-memory workloads typical of blockchain and machine learning model optimization, while Flink excelled in processing stream data, which is timely and important to the IoT world. These performance characteristics emphasize how the capabilities of graph processing systems can match the requirements for the performance of different emerging technology applications. Our findings ultimately inform practitioners about system efficiencies and limitations, but also the recent advances in hardware accelerators and algorithmic improvements aimed at shaping the new graph processing frontier in diverse technology domains.