The field of network science is a highly interdisciplinary area; for the empirical analysis of network data, it draws algorithmic methodologies from several research fields. Hence, research procedures and descriptions of the technical results often differ, sometimes widely. In this paper we focus on methodologies for the experimental part of algorithm engineering for network analysis—an important ingredient for a research area with empirical focus. More precisely, we unify and adapt existing recommendations from different fields and propose universal guidelines—including statistical analyses—for the systematic evaluation of network analysis algorithms. This way, the behavior of newly proposed algorithms can be properly assessed and comparisons to existing solutions become meaningful. Moreover, as the main technical contribution, we provide SimexPal, a highly automated tool to perform and analyze experiments following our guidelines. To illustrate the merits of SimexPal and our guidelines, we apply them in a case study: we design, perform, visualize and evaluate experiments of a recent algorithm for approximating betweenness centrality, an important problem in network analysis. In summary, both our guidelines and SimexPal shall modernize and complement previous efforts in experimental algorithmics; they are not only useful for network analysis, but also in related contexts.

Analyzing massive complex networks yields promising insights about our everyday lives. Building scalable algorithms to do so is a challenging task that requires a careful analysis and an extensive evaluation. However, engineering such algorithms is often hindered by the scarcity of publicly~available~datasets. Network generators serve as a tool to alleviate this problem by providing synthetic instances with controllable parameters. However, many network generators fail to provide instances on a massive scale due to their sequential nature or resource constraints. Additionally, truly scalable network generators are few and often limited in their realism. In this work, we present novel generators for a variety of network models that are frequently used as benchmarks. By making use of pseudorandomization and divide-and-conquer schemes, our generators follow a communication-free paradigm. The resulting generators are thus embarrassingly parallel and have a near optimal scaling behavior. This allows us to generate instances of up to $2^{43}$ vertices and $2^{47}$ edges in less than 22 minutes on 32768 cores. Therefore, our generators allow new graph families to be used on an unprecedented scale.