Title: The Ubiquity of Large Graphs and Surprising Challenges of Graph Processing,
Abstract: Graph processing is becoming increasingly prevalent across many application
domains. In spite of this prevalence, there is little research about how graphs
are actually used in practice. We conducted an online survey aimed at
understanding: (i) the types of graphs users have; (ii) the graph computations
users run; (iii) the types of graph software users use; and (iv) the major
challenges users face when processing their graphs. We describe the
participants' responses to our questions highlighting common patterns and
challenges. We further reviewed user feedback in the mailing lists, bug
reports, and feature requests in the source repositories of a large suite of
software products for processing graphs. Through our review, we were able to
answer some new questions that were raised by participants' responses and
identify specific challenges that users face when using different classes of
graph software. The participants' responses and data we obtained revealed
surprising facts about graph processing in practice. In particular, real-world
graphs represent a very diverse range of entities and are often very large, and
scalability and visualization are undeniably the most pressing challenges faced
by participants. We hope these findings can guide future research.