GRIP: Graph Drawing with Intelligent Placement

Abstract

This paper describes a system for Graph dRawing with Intelligent Placement, GRIP\xspace. The system is designed for drawing large graphs and uses a novel multi-dimensional force-directed method together with fast energy function minimization. The algorithm underlying the system employs a simple recursive coarsening scheme. Rather than being placed at random, vertices are placed intelligently, several at a time, at locations close to their final positions. The running time and space complexity of the system are near linear. The implementation is in C using OpenGL for 3D viewing. The GRIP\xspace system allows for drawing graphs with tens of thousands of vertices in under one minute on a mid-range PC. To the best of the authors' knowledge, GRIP\xspace surpasses the fastest previous algorithms. However, speed is not achieved at the expense of quality as the resulting drawings are quite aesthetically pleasing.