  An important objective for analyzing real-world graphs is to achieve scalable
performance on large, streaming graphs. A challenging and relevant example is
the graph partition problem. As a combinatorial problem, graph partition is
NP-hard, but existing relaxation methods provide reasonable approximate
solutions that can be scaled for large graphs. Competitive benchmarks and
challenges have proven to be an effective means to advance state-of-the-art
performance and foster community collaboration. This paper describes a graph
partition challenge with a baseline partition algorithm of sub-quadratic
complexity. The algorithm employs rigorous Bayesian inferential methods based
on a statistical model that captures characteristics of the real-world graphs.
This strong foundation enables the algorithm to address limitations of
well-known graph partition approaches such as modularity maximization. This
paper describes various aspects of the challenge including: (1) the data sets
and streaming graph generator, (2) the baseline partition algorithm with
pseudocode, (3) an argument for the correctness of parallelizing the Bayesian
inference, (4) different parallel computation strategies such as node-based
parallelism and matrix-based parallelism, (5) evaluation metrics for partition
correctness and computational requirements, (6) preliminary timing of a
Python-based demonstration code and the open source C++ code, and (7)
considerations for partitioning the graph in streaming fashion. Data sets and
source code for the algorithm as well as metrics, with detailed documentation
are available at GraphChallenge.org.
