Dendrite

People. Places. Things. Graphs.

It turns out that much of the world, both physical and virtual, can be represented as a graph. Graphs describe things that are linked together such as web pages and human societies. Like many other topics, Web technologies can make these types of powerful mathematical concepts more accessible to everyday users. Dendrite is a Lab41 exploration of ways to analyze, manipulate, version, and share extremely large graphs:

• The Web frontend leverages AngularJS to provide a responsive data-driven experience.
• The UI interacts with a backend instance of the Titan Distributed Graph Database.
• The backend uses GraphLab, Faunus, and Jung for graph analytics.

Install instructions

1. Check out the code. As of right now, we have to use the Lab41 forks of Titan and Faunus:

% git clone https://github.com/Lab41/titan.git
% cd titan
% git checkout dendrite-hadoop2
% mvn install -DskipTests=true
% cd ..
% git clone https://github.com/Lab41/faunus.git
% cd faunus
% git checkout dendrite-hadoop2
% mvn install -DskipTests=true
% cd ..
% git clone https://github.com/Lab41/Dendrite.git
% cd Dendrite

2. Start the application.

Dendrite has two run profiles. The first, which is the default, is the development profile. This uses Titan's BerkeleyDB backend and an embedded Elasticsearch to service all the requests. It can be launched with:

% ./bin/dendrite-server start

To run Dendrite in production mode with HBase and an External Elasticsearch first edit src/main/resources/META-INF/spring/prod/dendrite.properties to match your environment, for example:

dendrite-graph-factory.name-prefix=dendrite-prod-
dendrite-graph-factory.storage.backend=hbase
dendrite-graph-factory.storage.hostname=server.fqdn
dendrite-graph-factory.storage.port=2181
dendrite-graph-factory.storage.index.backend=elasticsearch
dendrite-graph-factory.storage.index.hostname=server.fqdn
dendrite-graph-factory.storage.index.client-only=true
dendrite-graph-factory.storage.index.local-mode=false
metadata-graph.properties=/WEB-INF/metadata-graph.properties
metadata.directory=/tmp/dendrite
history.properties=/WEB-INF/history.properties

If you plan to use GraphLab with Dendrite, be sure and install mpiexec on the Dendrite server, as well as allow passwordless ssh from the Dendrite server to the GraphLab cluster.

Then launch dendrite with:

% export HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/etc/hadoop/conf
% hadoop fs -mkdir -p dendrite/
% hadoop fs -put src/main/groovy/org/lab41/dendrite/dendrite-import.groovy dendrite/
% DENDRITE_PROFILE=prod ./bin/dendrite-server start

3. Once dendrite-server is running initialize a graph-of-the-gods example graph:

% pip install requests
% ./bin/dendrite create-project --script ./data/init-graph-of-the-gods.groovy my-project-name

4. After the webserver is up and running browse to http://server.fqdn:8000/dendrite
5. Login as a user with user/password or as an admin with admin/password

Building a WAR File

1. Build the dependencies as specified in the Install Instructions.
2. Build the WAR file:

% mvn package

WARNING: using mvn war:war does not actually run through the full build lifecycle, and can leave out critical files.

Required Dependencies

• Java
• Maven
• Python
• Python Pip

Optional Dependencies

• Hadoop
• HBase
• Elasticsearch

Currently supported import and export graph formats

• GML
• GraphML
• GraphSON

Related repositories

• MRKronecker
• graph-generators

Contributing to Dendrite

What to contribute? Awesome! Issue a pull request or see more details here.