Visualizing Undirected Graph That's Too Large for GraphViz?

graph-theory graphviz graph-layout
Gabe picture Gabe · Oct 26, 2008 · Viewed 31.8k times · Source

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 Tulip and Cytoscape claim they can handle it but don't seem to be able to. (Tulip does nothing and Cytoscape claims to be working, and then just stops.)

I'd just like a vector format file (ps or pdf) with a remotely reasonable layout of the nodes.

Answer

Anthony Liekens picture Anthony Liekens · Feb 23, 2011

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

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