An Interactive Environment to Manipulate Large Graphs

Interactive environments such as Matlab and Star-P have made numerical computing tremendously accessible to engineers and scientists. They allow people who are not well-versed in the art of numerical computing to nonetheless reap the benefits of numerical computing. The same is not true in general for combinatorial computing. Often, many interesting problems require a mix of numerical and combinatorial computing. Tools developed for numerical computing - such as sparse matrix algorithms - can also be used to develop a comprehensive infrastructure for graph algorithms. We describe the current status of our effort to build a comprehensive infrastructure for operations on large graphs in an interactive parallel environment such as Star-P.