Xia Liao

dblp:271/7795 · DBLP profile ↗
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10ranked-venue papers
2as first author
10since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-6823-758XORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Systems, architecture and hardware · 6 · 2 first-author · 6 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 3 · 3 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Scaling Asynchronous Graph Query Processing via Partitioned Stateful Traversal Machines
abstract
Due to the escalating demand to analyze large graphs, many organizations are now collecting billion-level property graph datasets, concurrently executing many complex graph queries against them, and expecting interactive-level response latency. However, such requirements are particularly challenging because of the notoriously irregular data access pattern and complex dependencies between heterogeneous subtasks. Despite the widespread availability of many-core CPUs and high-speed networking in modern datacenters, existing distributed graph query systems struggle with their inherent inefficiencies, resulting in low hardware utilization and poor query performance on these state-of-the-art hardware. To address these challenges, we introduce the Partitioned Stateful Traversal Machine (PSTM), which extends the Gremlin graph traversal machine. PSTM retains the expressive power of the Gremlin query language, enabling it to accommodate a wide range of graph query tasks, including traversal, pattern matching, filtering, and result aggregation. It additionally introduces query memoranda, allowing for more efficient implementation and execution of numerous graph queries in distributed environments. Moreover, PSTM facilitates various system-level optimizations, such as massively parallel execution, overlapping computation with communication, locality-aware data access, and lightweight progress tracking. Building upon PSTM, we develop GraphDance, a distributed graph database featuring an efficient asynchronous PSTM run-time. Our evaluations, conducted on an 8-node cluster, show that GraphDance achieves millisecond-level query latency for complex queries on terabyte-scale graphs, with an average latency reduction of 89.2% across all interactive complex queries in the LDBC SNB benchmark compared to existing distributed graph query systems.
Shaoyuan Chen, Hongtao Chen, Shaonan Ma, Yajie Qin, Weiyu Xie, Kang Chen 0001, Xia Liao, Yingdi Shan, Jinlei Jiang, Yongwei Wu 0001
ICDE9
2025 OOCC: One-Round Optimistic Concurrency Control for Read-Only Disaggregated Transactions
abstract
Read-only transactions predominate in many critical real-world scenarios. Yet, the presence of even a small proportion of read-write transactions poses challenges for existing Two-Phase Locking (2PL) and Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) based disaggregated transaction solutions. These approaches require either atomic operations or double reads to maintain consistent data for serializability, leading to suboptimal performance. This paper introduces OOCC, a novel One-round Optimistic Concurrency Control method tailored for disaggregated trans-actions. We propose that by intentionally postponing updates in write transactions for a moderate duration (a lease), it's possible to skip the validation phase in most OCC cases. This method enables read-only transactions to be completed within a single Round Trip Time (RTT) without involving any atomic operations. Additionally, we introduce several enhancements to boost OOCC's effectiveness in high-contention and write-intensive scenarios by reducing lock durations to just 1 RTT. Our experimental results demonstrate that OOCC significantly boosts transaction throughput in read-heavy environments, showing improvements ranging from 1.2 to 4 times. OOCC consis-tently achieves the lowest average latency (40 % -45 % lower than the best counterpart) in both read- and write-heavy workloads.
Kang Chen 0001, Xia Liao, Yingdi Shan, Yongwei Wu 0001
ICDE4
2024 VertexSurge: Variable Length Graph Pattern Match on Billion-edge Graphs
abstract
Variable-Length Graph Pattern Matching (VLGPM) is a critical functionality in graph databases, pivotal for identifying patterns where the number of connecting edges between two matched vertices is variable. This function plays a vital role in analyzing complex and dynamic networks such as social networks or bank transfers networks, where relationships can vary extensively in both length and structure. However, despite its importance, current graph databases, optimized primarily for single-hop subgraph matching, struggle with VLGPM over large graphs.
Weiyu Xie, Xia Liao, Kang Chen 0001, Jinlei Jiang, Yongwei Wu 0001
ASPLOS (4)3
2024 Xorbits: Automating Operator Tiling for Distributed Data Science
abstract
Data science pipelines commonly utilize dataframe and array operations for tasks such as data preprocessing, analysis, and machine learning. The most popular tools for these tasks are pandas and NumPy. However, these tools are limited to executing on a single node, making them unsuitable for processing large-scale data. Several systems have attempted to distribute data science applications to clusters while maintaining interfaces similar to single-node libraries, enabling data scientists to scale their workloads without significant effort. However, existing systems often struggle with processing large datasets due to Out-of-Memory (OOM) problems caused by poor data partitioning. To overcome these challenges, we develop Xorbits, a high-performance, scalable data science framework specifically designed to distribute data science workloads across clusters while retaining familiar APIs. The key differentiator of Xorbits is its ability to dynamically switch between graph construction and graph execution. Xorbits has been successfully deployed in production environments with up to 5k CPU cores. Its applications span various domains, including user behavior analysis and recommendation systems in the e-commerce sector, as well as credit assessment and risk management in the finance industry. Users can easily scale their data science workloads by simply changing the import line of their pandas and NumPy code. Our experiments demonstrate that Xorbits can effectively process very large datasets without encountering OOM or data-skewing problems. Over the fastest state-of-the-art solutions, Xorbits achieves an impressive 2.66 × speedup on average. In terms of API coverage, Xorbits attains a compatibility rate of 96.7%, surpassing the fastest framework by an impressive margin of 60 percentage points. Xorbits is available at https://github.com/xorbitsai/xorbits.
Weizheng Lu, Kaisheng He, Xuye Qin, Xia Liao, Feng Zhang 0001, Yueguo Chen, Xiaoyong Du 0001
ICDE7
2024 TrEnv: Transparently Share Serverless Execution Environments Across Different Functions and Nodes
abstract
Serverless computing is renowned for its computation elasticity, yet its full potential is often constrained by the requirement for functions to operate within local and dedicated background environments, resulting in limited memory elasticity. To address this limitation, this paper introduces TrEnv, a co-designed integration of the serverless platform with the operating system and CXL/RDMA-based remote memory pools in two key areas. Firstly, TrEnv introduces repurposable sandboxes, which can be shared across different functions and hence, substantially decrease the overhead associated with creating isolation sandboxes. Secondly, it augments the OS with "memory templates" that enable rapid restoration of function states stored on remote memory. These innovations allow TrEnv to facilitate rapid transitions between instances of different functions and enable memory sharing across multiple nodes. Our evaluations using a variety of representative and real-world workloads demonstrate that TrEnv can initiate a container within 10 milliseconds, achieving up to a 7× speedup in P99 end-to-end latency and reducing memory usage by 48% on average compared to state-of-the-art on-demand restoring systems.
Teng Ma 0006, Zheng Liu 0022, Sixing Lin, Kang Chen 0001, Jinlei Jiang, Xia Liao, Yingdi Shan, Mengting Lu, Tao Ma 0006, Haifeng Gong, Yongwei Wu 0001
SOSP8
2024 Graph-Centric Performance Analysis for Large-Scale Parallel Applications
abstract
Performance analysis is essential for understanding the performance behaviors of parallel programs and detecting performance bottlenecks. Whereas, complex interconnections across several types of performance bugs, as well as inter-process communications and data dependence, make efficient performance analysis even more difficult. Despite the fact that many performance tools have been developed, accurately identifying underlying performance bottlenecks for such complex scenarios requires specific in-depth analysis. Significant human efforts and analysis knowledge are often required to implement each specific analytic task. To alleviate the complexity of developing specific performance analytic tasks, we present a programmable performance analysis tool, calledPerFlow. InPerFlow, a step-by-step performance analysis process is represented as an Analysis Flow Diagram, which is constructed with several performance analysis sub-tasks, namely passes, that can be defined by developers or provided byPerFlow's built-in analysis pass library. Furthermore, we define a Performance Abstraction Graph to describe the performance behavior of a parallel program, where the edges indicate the interactions between parallel units, therefore the analytic sub-tasks are converted to graph analysis tasks.PerFlowprovides plentiful Python APIs for developing analytic tasks. Several case studies of real-world applications with up to 700 K lines of code are used to demonstrate the effectiveness ofPerFlow. The results indicate thatPerFlowmakes it much easier to implement specific performance analytic tasks, and these tasks are performed automatically and efficiently to detect underlying performance bottlenecks.
Yuyang Jin 0001, Haojie Wang 0004, Runxin Zhong, Chen Zhang 0001, Xia Liao, Feng Zhang 0007, Jidong Zhai
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst.5
2023 A parallel structured banded DC algorithm for symmetric eigenvalue problems
Shengguo Li, Xia Liao, Yutong Lu, José E. Román, Xiaoqiang Yue
CCF Trans. High Perform. Comput.2
2022 Optimizing data query performance of Bi-cluster for large-scale scientific data in supercomputers
Xia Liao, Yixian Shen, Shengguo Li, Yutong Lu, Yufei Du, Zhiguang Chen 0001
J. Supercomput.1
2022 Efficient Data Redistribution Algorithms From Irregular to Block Cyclic Data Distribution
abstract
In this paper, we propose some efficient data redistribution algorithms for redistributing matrices from 1D or 2D irregular format to block cyclic data distribution (BCDD) format, which can be much faster than the BLACS routinePXGEMR2D. These algorithms can be used to combine direct methods with iterative methods. The proposed algorithms divide the communication into two phases: one for processes in the same column and the other for processes in the same row, and the whole data redistribution task is divided into several independent sub-communications. The communication time can be reduced a lot compared with BLACS. Performance results show that our algorithms can be$2\times$–$5\times$faster than the BLACS routinePXGEMR2Dwhen using 4096 processes and the experiments are performed on Tianhe-2A supercomputer.
Shengguo Li, Hao Jiang 0001, Dezun Dong, Chun Huang 0006, Jie Liu 0002, Xia Liao, Xuguang Chen
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst.6
2021 A Parallel Structured Divide-and-Conquer Algorithm for Symmetric Tridiagonal Eigenvalue Problems
abstract
In this article, a parallel structured divide-and-conquer (PSDC) eigensolver is proposed for symmetric tridiagonal matrices based on ScaLAPACK and a parallel structured matrix multiplication algorithm, called PSMMA. Computing the eigenvectors via matrix-matrix multiplications is the most computationally expensive part of the divide-and-conquer algorithm, and one of the matrices involved in such multiplications is a rank-structured Cauchy-like matrix. By exploiting this particular property, PSMMA constructs the local matrices by using generators of Cauchy-like matrices without any communication, and further reduces the computation costs by using a structured low-rank approximation algorithm. Thus, both the communication and computation costs are reduced. Experimental results show that both PSMMA and PSDC are highly scalable and scale to 4096 processes at least. PSDC has better scalability than PHDC that was proposed in [16] and only scaled to 300 processes for the same matrices. Comparing with PDSTEDC in ScaLAPACK, PSDC is always faster and achieves 1.4x-1.6x speedup for some matrices with few deflations. PSDC is also comparable with ELPA, with PSDC being faster than ELPA when using few processes and a little slower when using many processes.
Xia Liao, Shengguo Li, Yutong Lu, José E. Román
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst.1