Large scale graph visualization (50K nodes, 100M weighted edges)

Question

I've looked at a number of packages for graph layout (Graphviz, Gephi, Cytoscape, NetworkX to name a few of the more prevalent) and none of them seem to scale to this sort of size. What techniques exist for either visualizing graphs of this size or reducing them to something more manageable?

Answer 1

Gephi's OpenOrd visualisation plugin can layout millions of nodes.

Answer 2

I've used the visualisation toolkit Processing for visualising networks of about 30K nodes. It won't have any problems rendering your nodes but you'll need to remove some of your edges, perhaps remove those with the lowest weight (if it's weighted), or, as suggested elsewhere, construct a hypergraph.

There's no networks library for Processing at this time, so there's no access to layout algorithms etc, you'll have to implement it yourself, bit it's pretty quick to do. I've been considering publishing a library to aid this kind of visualisation.

http://www.processing.org

Answer 3

Tulip is suited to exactly this, but it's rendering isn't very fast once you get to high numbers of nodes and edges.