Optimized Block-Based Algorithms to Label Connected Components on GPUs

Connected Components Labeling (CCL) is a crucial step of several image processing and computer vision pipelines. Many efficient sequential strategies exist, among which one of the most effective is the use of a block-based mask to drastically cut the number of memory accesses. In the last decade, aided by the fast development of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), a lot of data parallel CCL algorithms have been proposed along with sequential ones. Applications that entirely run in GPU can benefit from parallel implementations of CCL that allow to avoid expensive memory transfers between host and device. In this paper, two new eight-connectivity CCL algorithms are proposed, namely Block-based Union Find (BUF) and Block-based Komura Equivalence (BKE). These algorithms optimize existing GPU solutions introducing a block-based approach. Extensions for three-dimensional datasets are also discussed. In order to produce a fair comparison with previously proposed alternatives, YACCLAB, a public CCL benchmarking framework, has been extended and made suitable for evaluating also GPU algorithms. Moreover, three-dimensional datasets have been added to its collection. Experimental results on real cases and synthetically generated datasets demonstrate the superiority of the new proposals with respect to state-of-the-art, both on 2D and 3D scenarios

Gunrock: GPU Graph Analytics

For large-scale graph analytics on the GPU, the irregularity of data access and control flow, and the complexity of programming GPUs, have presented two significant challenges to 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 characterize the performance of various optimization strategies and evaluate Gunrock's overall performance on different GPU architectures on a wide range of graph primitives that span from traversal-based algorithms and ranking algorithms, to triangle counting and bipartite-graph-based algorithms. The results show that on a single GPU, Gunrock has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over Boost and PowerGraph, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives and CPU shared-memory graph libraries such as Ligra and Galois, and better performance than any other GPU high-level graph library.Comment: 52 pages, invited paper to ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (TOPC), an extended version of PPoPP'16 paper "Gunrock: A High-Performance Graph Processing Library on the GPU

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

Connected component identification and cluster update on GPU

Cluster identification tasks occur in a multitude of contexts in physics and engineering such as, for instance, cluster algorithms for simulating spin models, percolation simulations, segmentation problems in image processing, or network analysis. While it has been shown that graphics processing units (GPUs) can result in speedups of two to three orders of magnitude as compared to serial codes on CPUs for the case of local and thus naturally parallelized problems such as single-spin flip update simulations of spin models, the situation is considerably more complicated for the non-local problem of cluster or connected component identification. I discuss the suitability of different approaches of parallelization of cluster labeling and cluster update algorithms for calculations on GPU and compare to the performance of serial implementations.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, one table, submitted to PR

Quest for Speed: The Epic Saga of Record-Breaking on OpenCV Connected Components Extraction

Connected Components Labeling (CCL) represents an essential part of many Image Processing and Computer Vision pipelines. Given its relevance on the field, it has been part of most cutting-edge Computer Vision libraries. In this paper, all the algorithms included in the OpenCV during the years are reviewed, from sequential to parallel/GPU-based implementations. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of what has changed and why one algorithm should be preferred to another both in terms of memory usage and execution speed