Integrating GraphAlg into Existing Systems

GraphAlg is specifically designed to be integrated into existing systems. The GraphAlg compiler source code is freely available under a permissive license. The compiler can be integrated into other systems as a C++ library. Below we describe the three main integration points you can use depending on the properties of the target system.

Integrating The Reference Backend

To minimize the required porting effort you can use the full compiler including the reference backend. An example of this approach is the GraphAlg Playground (see the C++ component in particular). An important caveat is that the reference is only designed to handle very small example-sized graphs. It will be slow and use a lot of memory if you try to use it with a larger graph (>100 nodes or edges).

Integrating From Relational Algebra

If your system uses a relational algebra representation internally, or something akin to it, you can leverage the conversion to relational algebra. If your system supports common arithmetic operations and aggregator functions, you only need to implement suitable a loop operator. All other GraphAlg operations can be converted into standard relational algebra operations.

Example integration

This approach is used by AvantGraph, but source code for this integration is not publicly available (yet). When this code becomes freely available, or if another integration using the same approach becomes available, we will link to that here.

Integrating From GraphAlg Core

The Core language has only a small number of high-level operations that need to be implemented. This may be a more suitable integration point if your system does not target relational algebra. To do this you should use the provided parser and run the pipeline to lower to GraphAlg Core.

Example integration

We do not currently have an example integration for this approach, although a GraphBLAS backend is planned that would use this strategy.