Par@Graph - a parallel toolbox for the construction and analysis of large complex climate networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present Par@Graph, a software toolbox to reconstruct and analyze complex climate networks having a large number of nodes (up to at least 106) and edges (up to at least 1012). The key innovation is an efficient set of parallel software tools designed to leverage the inherited hybrid parallelism in distributed-memory clusters of multicore machines. The performance of the toolbox is illustrated through networks derived from sea surface height (SSH) data of a global high-resolution ocean model. Less than 8 min are needed on 90 Intel Xeon E5-4650 processors to reconstruct a climate network including the preprocessing and the correlation of 3×105 SSH time series, resulting in a weighted graph with the same number of vertices and about 3.2×108 edges. In less than 14 min on 30 processors, the resulted graph’s degree centrality, strength, connected components, eigenvector centrality, entropy and clustering coefficient metrics were obtained. These results indicate that a complete cycle to construct and analyze a large-scale climate network is available under 22 min Par@Graph therefore facilitates the application of climate network analysis on high-resolution observations and model results, by enabling fast network reconstruct from the calculation of statistical similarities between climate time series. It also enables network analysis at un- precedented scales on a variety of different sizes of input data sets.