I would strongly advocate you look at NetworkX. It’s a battle-tested war horse and the first tool most ‘research’ types reach for when they need to do analysis of network based data. I have manipulated graphs with 100s of thousands of edges without problem on a notebook. Its feature rich and very easy to use. You will find yourself focusing more on the problem at hand rather than the details in the underlying implementation.

Example of Erdős-Rényi random graph generation and analysis

"""
Create an G{n,m} random graph with n nodes and m edges
and report some properties.

This graph is sometimes called the Erd##[m~Qs-Rényi graph
but is different from G{n,p} or binomial_graph which is also
sometimes called the Erd##[m~Qs-Rényi graph.
"""
__author__ = """Aric Hagberg (hagberg@lanl.gov)"""
__credits__ = """"""
#    Copyright (C) 2004-2006 by 
#    Aric Hagberg 
#    Dan Schult 
#    Pieter Swart 
#    Distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License
#    http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

from networkx import *
import sys

n=10 # 10 nodes
m=20 # 20 edges

G=gnm_random_graph(n,m)

# some properties
print "node degree clustering"
for v in nodes(G):
    print v,degree(G,v),clustering(G,v)

# print the adjacency list to terminal 
write_adjlist(G,sys.stdout)

Visualizations are also straightforward:

More visualization: http://jonschull.blogspot.com/2008/08/graph-visualization.html