Scalable Parallel Algorithms for Massive Scale-free Graphs

Efficiently storing and processing massive graph data sets is a challenging problem as researchers seek to leverage “Big Data” to answer next-generation scientific questions. New techniques are required to process large scale-free graphs in shared, distributed, and external memory. This dissertation develops new techniques to parallelize the storage, computation, and communication for scale-free graphs with high-degree vertices. Our work facilitates the processing of large real-world graph datasets through the development of parallel algorithms and tools that scale to large computational and memory resources, overcoming challenges not addressed by existing techniques. Our aim is to scale to trillions of edges, and our research is targeted at leadership class supercomputers, clusters with local non-volatile memory, and shared memory systems. We present three novel techniques to address scaling challenges in processing large scale-free graphs. We apply an asynchronous graph traversal technique using prioritized visitor queues that is capable of tolerating data latencies to the external graph storage media and message passing communication. To accommodate large high-degree vertices, we present an edge list partitioning technique that evenly partitions graphs containing high-degree vertices. Finally, we propose a technique we call distributed delegates that distributes and parallelizes the storage, computation, and communication when processing high-degree vertices. The edges of high-degree vertices are distributed, providing additional opportunities for parallelism not present in existing methods. We apply our techniques to multiple graph algorithms: Breadth-First Search, Single Source Shortest Path, Connected Components, K-Core decomposition, Triangle Counting, and Page Rank. Our experimental study of these algorithms demonstrates excellent scalability on supercomputers, clusters with non-volatile memory, and shared memory systems. Our study includes multiple synthetic scale-free graph models, the largest of which has trillion edges, and real-world input graphs. On a supercomputer, we demonstrate scalability up to 131K processors, and improve the best known Graph500 results for IBM BG/P Intrepid by 15%

Using Graph Properties to Speed-up GPU-based Graph Traversal: A Model-driven Approach

While it is well-known and acknowledged that the performance of graph algorithms is heavily dependent on the input data, there has been surprisingly little research to quantify and predict the impact the graph structure has on performance. Parallel graph algorithms, running on many-core systems such as GPUs, are no exception: most research has focused on how to efficiently implement and tune different graph operations on a specific GPU. However, the performance impact of the input graph has only been taken into account indirectly as a result of the graphs used to benchmark the system. In this work, we present a case study investigating how to use the properties of the input graph to improve the performance of the breadth-first search (BFS) graph traversal. To do so, we first study the performance variation of 15 different BFS implementations across 248 graphs. Using this performance data, we show that significant speed-up can be achieved by combining the best implementation for each level of the traversal. To make use of this data-dependent optimization, we must correctly predict the relative performance of algorithms per graph level, and enable dynamic switching to the optimal algorithm for each level at runtime. We use the collected performance data to train a binary decision tree, to enable high-accuracy predictions and fast switching. We demonstrate empirically that our decision tree is both fast enough to allow dynamic switching between implementations, without noticeable overhead, and accurate enough in its prediction to enable significant BFS speedup. We conclude that our model-driven approach (1) enables BFS to outperform state of the art GPU algorithms, and (2) can be adapted for other BFS variants, other algorithms, or more specific datasets