Performance Impact of Memory Channels on Sparse and Irregular Algorithms

Graph processing is typically considered to be a memory-bound rather than compute-bound problem. One common line of thought is that more available memory bandwidth corresponds to better graph processing performance. However, in this work we demonstrate that the key factor in the utilization of the memory system for graph algorithms is not necessarily the raw bandwidth or even the latency of memory requests. Instead, we show that performance is proportional to the number of memory channels available to handle small data transfers with limited spatial locality. Using several widely used graph frameworks, including Gunrock (on the GPU) and GAPBS \& Ligra (for CPUs), we evaluate key graph analytics kernels using two unique memory hierarchies, DDR-based and HBM/MCDRAM. Our results show that the differences in the peak bandwidths of several Pascal-generation GPU memory subsystems aren't reflected in the performance of various analytics. Furthermore, our experiments on CPU and Xeon Phi systems demonstrate that the number of memory channels utilized can be a decisive factor in performance across several different applications. For CPU systems with smaller thread counts, the memory channels can be underutilized while systems with high thread counts can oversaturate the memory subsystem, which leads to limited performance. Finally, we model the potential performance improvements of adding more memory channels with narrower access widths than are found in current platforms, and we analyze performance trade-offs for the two most prominent types of memory accesses found in graph algorithms, streaming and random accesses

Graph Processing on FPGAs: Taxonomy, Survey, Challenges

Graph processing has become an important part of various areas, such as machine learning, computational sciences, medical applications, social network analysis, and many others. Various graphs, for example web or social networks, may contain up to trillions of edges. The sheer size of such datasets, combined with the irregular nature of graph processing, poses unique challenges for the runtime and the consumed power. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be an energy-efficient solution to deliver specialized hardware for graph processing. This is reflected by the recent interest in developing various graph algorithms and graph processing frameworks on FPGAs. To facilitate understanding of this emerging domain, we present the first survey and taxonomy on graph computations on FPGAs. Our survey describes and categorizes existing schemes and explains key ideas. Finally, we discuss research and engineering challenges to outline the future of graph computations on FPGAs

A Survey on Graph Processing Accelerators: Challenges and Opportunities

Graph is a well known data structure to represent the associated relationships in a variety of applications, e.g., data science and machine learning. Despite a wealth of existing efforts on developing graph processing systems for improving the performance and/or energy efficiency on traditional architectures, dedicated hardware solutions, also referred to as graph processing accelerators, are essential and emerging to provide the benefits significantly beyond those pure software solutions can offer. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey regarding the design and implementation of graph processing accelerator. Specifically, we review the relevant techniques in three core components toward a graph processing accelerator: preprocessing, parallel graph computation and runtime scheduling. We also examine the benchmarks and results in existing studies for evaluating a graph processing accelerator. Interestingly, we find that there is not an absolute winner for all three aspects in graph acceleration due to the diverse characteristics of graph processing and complexity of hardware configurations. We finially present to discuss several challenges in details, and to further explore the opportunities for the future research.Comment: This article has been accepted by Journal of Computer Science and Technolog