GraphLab
title: "GraphLab" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["data-mining-and-machine-learning-software", "apple-inc.-acquisitions"] topic_path: "technology/computing" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraphLab" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0
::data[format=table title="Infobox software"]
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| name | Turi |
| developer | Carnegie Mellon University |
| latest release version | v2.2 |
| latest release date | |
| operating system | Linux, macOS |
| programming language | C++ |
| genre | Machine learning platform |
| license | Proprietary |
| website | |
| :: |
| name = Turi | developer = Carnegie Mellon University | latest release version = v2.2 | latest release date = | latest preview version = | latest preview date = | operating system = Linux, macOS | size = | programming language = C++ | genre = Machine learning platform | license = Proprietary | website =
Turi is a graph-based, high performance, distributed computation framework written in C++. The GraphLab project was started by Prof. Carlos Guestrin of Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. It is an open source project that uses the Apache License. While GraphLab was originally developed for machine learning tasks, it has also been developed for other data-mining tasks.
Motivation
As the amounts of collected data and computing power grow (multicore, GPUs, clusters, clouds), modern datasets no longer fit into one computing node. Efficient distributed parallel algorithms for handling large-scale data are required. The GraphLab framework is a parallel programming abstraction targeted for sparse iterative graph algorithms. GraphLab provides a programming interface, allowing deployment of distributed machine learning algorithms. The main design considerations behind the design of GraphLab are:
- Sparse data with local dependencies
- Iterative algorithms
- Potentially asynchronous execution
GraphLab toolkits
On top of GraphLab, several implemented libraries of algorithms:
- Topic modeling - contains applications like LDA, which can be used to cluster documents and extract topical representations.
- Graph analytics - contains applications like pagerank and triangle counting, which can be applied to general graphs to estimate community structure.
- Clustering - contains standard data clustering tools such as Kmeans
- Collaborative filtering - contains a collection of applications used to make predictions about users interests and factorize large matrices.
- Graphical models - contains tools for making joint predictions about collections of related random variables.
- Computer vision - contains a collection of tools for reasoning about images.
Turi
Turi (formerly called Dato and before that GraphLab Inc.) is a company that was founded by Prof. Carlos Guestrin from University of Washington in May 2013 to continue development support of the GraphLab open source project. Dato Inc. raised a $6.75M Series A from Madrona Venture Group and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). They raised a $18.5M Series B from Vulcan Capital and Opus Capital, with participation from Madrona and NEA. On August 5, 2016, Turi was acquired by Apple Inc. for $200,000,000.
References
References
- Joseph Gonzalez, Yucheng Low, Haijie Gu, Danny Bickson, Carlos Guestrin (2012). "PowerGraph: Distributed Graph-Parallel Computation on Natural Graphs." Proceedings of Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).
- Yucheng Low, Joseph Gonzalez, Aapo Kyrola, Danny Bickson, Carlos Guestrin and Joseph M. Hellerstein (2012). "Distributed GraphLab: A Framework for Machine Learning and Data Mining in the Cloud." Proceedings of Very Large Data Bases (PVLDB).
- Y. Low, J. Gonzalez, A. Kyrola, D. Bickson, C. Guestrin and J. Hellerstein. GraphLab: A New Framework for Parallel Machine Learning. In the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), Catalina Island, USA, 2010
- "GraphLab: Distributed Graph-Parallel API: Topic Modeling".
- "GraphLab: Distributed Graph-Parallel API: Graph Analytics".
- "GraphLab Clustering Library".
- "GraphLab: Collaborative filtering library using matrix factorization methods".
- "GraphLab: Distributed Graph-Parallel API: Graphical Models".
- "GraphLab: Distributed Graph-Parallel API: Computer Vision".
- Gage, Deborah. (2015-01-08). "GraphLab, Now Dato, Raises $18.5M for Machine-Learning Applications". WSJ Blogs.
- Clover, Juli. "Apple Acquires Machine Learning and AI Startup Turi".
- (2016-08-05). "Exclusive: Apple acquires Turi in major exit for Seattle-based machine learning and AI startup".
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