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Programming GPGPU Graph Applications with Linear Algebra Building Blocks

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Abstract

Graph applications are common in scientific and enterprise computing. Recent research used graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate graph workloads. These applications tend to present characteristics that are challenging for SIMD execution. To achieve high performance, prior work studied individual graph problems, and designed device-specific algorithms and optimizations to achieve high performance. However, programmers have to expend significant manual effort, packing data and computation to make such solutions GPU-friendly. This usually is too complex for regular programmers, and the resultant implementations may not be portable and perform well across platforms. To address these concerns, we propose and implement a library of software building blocks with application examples, BelRed which allows programmers to build graph applications with ease. BelRed currently is built on top of the OpenCL™ framework and optimized for GPUs. It consists of fundamental linear-algebra building blocks necessary for graph processing. Developers can program graph algorithms with a set of key primitives. This paper introduces the API and presents several case studies on how to use the library for a variety of representative graph problems. We evaluate application performance on an AMD GPU and investigate optimization techniques to improve performance. We show that this framework is useful to provide satisfactory GPU acceleration of various graph applications and help reduce programming efforts significantly.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Micro Devices, Bellevue, WA, USA

    Shuai Che, Bradford M. Beckmann & Steven K. Reinhardt

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  1. Shuai Che
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  2. Bradford M. Beckmann
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  3. Steven K. Reinhardt
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Correspondence to Shuai Che.

Additional information

BelRed is famous road across Bellevue and Redmond, WA USA. This manuscript is an extension to the 6-page paper, “BelRed: Constructing GPGPU Graph Applications with Software Building Blocks”, in the 2014 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference.

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Che, S., Beckmann, B.M. & Reinhardt, S.K. Programming GPGPU Graph Applications with Linear Algebra Building Blocks. Int J Parallel Prog 45, 657–679 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-016-0448-z

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