Dagstuhl Seminar: High-Performance Graph Analytics for Motif Finding in Neuroscience Connectome Graphs and Beyond using Arachne
Abstract
The growth of network-structured data across domains like neuroscience and cybersecurity demands scalable graph analytics, but complex tasks like subgraph isomorphism remain accessible only to high-performance computing (HPC) specialists. Arachne is an open-source framework that democratizes high-performance graph analytics through a Python interface while abstracting parallelism complexities. It enables advanced graph algorithms to run efficiently from laptops to supercomputers. Arachne has been adopted by Harvard researchers for the MoMo connectome visualization tool, allowing neuroscientists to draw neural motifs that are translated into attributed subgraphs and searched using our novel HiPerMotif algorithm. Key innovations include HiPerMotif, which achieves up to 66× speedups over parallel approaches.Testing on large-scale datasets including FlyWire and the H01 human brain connectome demonstrates Arachne’s performance: completing complex subgraph searches in 38 seconds versus NetworkX’s 16,000+ seconds. This unified platform balances high-performance computation with accessibility, enabling researchers to extract insights from billion-scale graphs and advancing pattern matching across data-driven sciences.This research is supported in part by NSF grants CCF-2109988, OAC-2402560, and CCF-2453324.
Biography
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and founder of the Department of Data Science in the Ying Wu College of Computing and Director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to this, he served as founding Professor and Chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, at Georgia Institute of Technology. Bader is an elected Board Member of the Computing Research Association (CRA). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and SIAM; a recipient of the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award; the 2022 Innovation Hall of Fame inductee of the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering; a 2025 inductee of the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art’s Hall of Fame; and the 2025 recipient of the Heatherington Award for Technological Innovation. The Computer History Museum recognizes Bader for developing the first Linux-based supercomputer which became the predominant architecture for all major supercomputers in the world. In 2025, HPCwire named Bader as one of its “35 Legends”.
David A. Bader
Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology.