Gunrock: A High-Performance Graph Processing Library on the GPU

For large-scale graph analytics on the GPU, the irregularity of data access and control flow, and the complexity of programming GPUs have been two significant challenges for developing a programmable high-performance graph library. "Gunrock", our graph-processing system designed specifically for the GPU, uses a high-level, bulk-synchronous, data-centric abstraction focused on operations on a vertex or edge frontier. Gunrock achieves a balance between performance and expressiveness by coupling high performance GPU computing primitives and optimization strategies with a high-level programming model that allows programmers to quickly develop new graph primitives with small code size and minimal GPU programming knowledge. We evaluate Gunrock on five key graph primitives and show that Gunrock has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over Boost and PowerGraph, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives, and better performance than any other GPU high-level graph library.Comment: 14 pages, accepted by PPoPP'16 (removed the text repetition in the previous version v5

A Divide-and-Conquer Algorithm for Betweenness Centrality

The problem of efficiently computing the betweenness centrality of nodes has been researched extensively. To date, the best known exact and centralized algorithm for this task is an algorithm proposed in 2001 by Brandes. The contribution of our paper is Brandes++, an algorithm for exact efficient computation of betweenness centrality. The crux of our algorithm is that we create a sketch of the graph, that we call the skeleton, by replacing subgraphs with simpler graph structures. Depending on the underlying graph structure, using this skeleton and by keeping appropriate summaries Brandes++ we can achieve significantly low running times in our computations. Extensive experimental evaluation on real life datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm for different types of graphs. We release our code for benefit of the research community.Comment: Shorter version of this paper appeared in Siam Data Mining 201

Numerical Investigation of Metrics for Epidemic Processes on Graphs

This study develops the epidemic hitting time (EHT) metric on graphs measuring the expected time an epidemic starting at node $a$ in a fully susceptible network takes to propagate and reach node $b$. An associated EHT centrality measure is then compared to degree, betweenness, spectral, and effective resistance centrality measures through exhaustive numerical simulations on several real-world network data-sets. We find two surprising observations: first, EHT centrality is highly correlated with effective resistance centrality; second, the EHT centrality measure is much more delocalized compared to degree and spectral centrality, highlighting the role of peripheral nodes in epidemic spreading on graphs.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, In Proceedings of 2015 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computer

Message passing optimization of Harmonic Influence Centrality

This paper proposes a new measure of node centrality in social networks, the Harmonic Influence Centrality, which emerges naturally in the study of social influence over networks. Using an intuitive analogy between social and electrical networks, we introduce a distributed message passing algorithm to compute the Harmonic Influence Centrality of each node. Although its design is based on theoretical results which assume the network to have no cycle, the algorithm can also be successfully applied on general graphs.Comment: 11 pages; 10 figures; to appear as a journal publicatio