ThunderRW: An In-Memory Graph Random Walk Engine

Summary: ThunderRW is an in-memory graph random-walk engine enabling massive parallel walks with a step-centric Gather-Move-Update model and step interleaving to hide irregular memory access. It supports PPR, DeepWalk, Node2Vec, MetaPath, and outperforms prior systems by orders of magnitude, cutting CPU stalls from 73.1% to 15.0%. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12568
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 6.0130964e-05
Overall Rank: 6,003 | 58.82%
DOI: 10.14778/3476249.3476257

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Shixuan Sun (National University of Singapore)
2. Yuhang Chen (National University of Singapore)
3. Shengliang Lu (National University of Singapore)
4. Bingsheng He (National University of Singapore)
5. Yuchen Li (Singapore Management University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{sun_vldb21,
        title = {{ThunderRW: An In-Memory Graph Random Walk Engine}},
        author = {Sun, Shixuan and Chen, Yuhang and Lu, Shengliang and He, Bingsheng and Li, Yuchen},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {11},
        pages = {1992--2005},
        doi = {10.14778/3476249.3476257},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476249.3476257},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,642	CoroGraph: Bridging Cache Efficiency and Work Efficiency for Graph Algorithm Execution	2024	VLDB	7.2312616e-05
7,201	An I/O-Efficient Disk-based Graph System for Scalable Second-Order Random Walk of Large Graphs	2022	VLDB	5.6755554e-05
7,255	Space-Efficient Random Walks on Streaming Graphs	2023	VLDB	5.662517e-05
9,004	LightRW: FPGA Accelerated Graph Dynamic Random Walks	2023	SIGMOD	5.3343985e-05
9,948	uBlade: Efficient Batch Processing for Uncertain Graph Queries	2024	SIGMOD	5.1915905e-05
11,165	gSWORD: GPU-accelerated Sampling for Subgraph Counting	2024	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,228	FlowWalker: A Memory-efficient and High-performance GPU-based Dynamic Graph Random Walk Framework	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3	Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing	2010	SIGMOD	0.0012250108
20	Distributed GraphLab: A Framework for Machine Learning and Data Mining in the Cloud	2012	VLDB	0.00056944564
209	Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs	2009	VLDB	0.00024932174
545	Improving Index Performance through Prefetching	2001	SIGMOD	0.00016766463
937	Blogel: A Block-Centric Framework for Distributed Computation on Real-World Graphs	2014	VLDB	0.00013091546
956	Parallelizing Sequential Graph Computations	2017	SIGMOD	0.0001297452
1,966	GraphMat: High performance graph analytics made productive	2015	VLDB	9.3844743e-05
2,649	Asynchronous Memory Access Chaining	2016	VLDB	8.2926258e-05
2,767	Exploiting Coroutines to Attack the "Killer Nanoseconds"	2018	VLDB	8.1507611e-05
2,890	Interleaving with Coroutines: A Practical Approach for Robust Index Joins	2018	VLDB	7.9880033e-05
3,435	Improving Main Memory Hash Joins on Intel Xeon Phi Processors: An Experimental Approach	2015	VLDB	7.4172582e-05
3,644	CoroBase: Coroutine-Oriented Main-Memory Database Engine	2021	VLDB	7.2306862e-05
4,024	TopPPR: Top-k Personalized PageRank Queries with Precision Guarantees on Large Graphs	2018	SIGMOD	6.9479974e-05
4,225	Realtime Top-k Personalized PageRank over Large Graphs on GPUs	2020	VLDB	6.821373e-05
5,250	Parallel Personalized PageRank on Dynamic Graphs	2018	VLDB	6.2992176e-05
5,612	Cache-Efficient Fork-Processing Patterns on Large Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	6.1501992e-05
6,423	Memory-Aware Framework for Efficient Second-Order Random Walk on Large Graphs	2020	SIGMOD	5.8813146e-05

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1	4,497	Leveraging History for Faster Sampling of Online Social Networks	2015	VLDB
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3	2,073	BePI: Fast and Memory-Efficient Method for Billion-Scale Random Walk with Restart	2017	SIGMOD
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