4.10.1.3 Reductions

Within these parallel blocks it is common to atomically update, or reduce to, a variable defined outside the lambda. These atomic reductions are available as methods on Scalar<T>: reduceAdd, reduceMul, reduceAnd, and so on. For example, to count the number of vertices in a graph:

public int countVertices() {
    Scalar<Integer> count = Scalar.create(0);

    G.getVertices().forEach(n -> {
        count.reduceAdd(1);
    });

    return count.get();
}

Sometimes you want to update multiple values atomically. For example, you might want to find the smallest property value as well as the vertex whose property value attains this smallest value. Due to the parallel execution, two separate reduction statements might get you in an inconsistent state.

To solve this problem the Reductions class provides argMin and argMax functions. The first argument to argMin is the current value and the second argument is the potential new minimum. Additionally, you can chain andUpdate calls on the ArgMinMax object to indicate other variables and the values that they should be updated to (atomically). For example:

VertexProperty<Integer> rank = VertexProperty.create();
int minRank = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
PgxVertex minVertex = PgxVertex.NONE;

G.getVertices().forEach(n ->
    argMin(minRank, rank.get(n)).andUpdate(minVertex, n)
);