Visualizing Undirected Graph That's Too Large for GraphViz?

Question

I need advice for rendering an undirected graph with 178,000 nodes and 500,000 edges. I\'ve tried Neato, Tulip, and Cytoscape. Neato doesn\'t even come remotely close, and

Answer 1

I expect edge clustering (http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=679&index=679&domain=) would help. This technique bundles related edges together, reducing the visual complexity of the graph. You may have to implement the algorithm yourself though.

Answer 2

I don't think you can come remotely close to visualising that in a flat layout.

I've been intrigued by Hyperbolic Graphs, described in this research paper for some time. Try the software from SourceForge.

Another idea is just graphing the nodes using a TreeMap as seen at Panopticode.

Answer 3

You might offer a sanitized version of the file to the developers of those tools as a debugging scenario, if all else fails.

Answer 4

There's a list of apps here: http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=414

Walrus and LGL are two tools supposedly suited for large graphs. However, both seem to require graphs to be input as text files in their own special format, which might be a pain.

Answer 5

Graphviz itself provides a solution for rendering large graphs.

Namely, Graphviz includes sfdp, a multiscale version of fdp (also in graphviz, similar to neato) for the layout of large undirected graphs which has been useful for drawing large graphs (70k nodes, 500k edges) in my project.

You can find documentation for this software on the graphviz web site itself at http://www.graphviz.org/

More information, a paper describing the underlying techniques and examples can be found here: http://yifanhu.net/PUB/graph_draw_small.pdf