BFS-4K: An Efficient Implementation of BFS for Kepler GPU Architectures

Breadth-first search (BFS) is one of the most common graph traversal algorithms and the building block for a wide range of graph applications. With the advent of graphics processing units (GPUs), several works have been proposed to accelerate graph algorithms and, in particular, BFS on such many-core architectures. Nevertheless, BFS has proven to be an algorithm for which it is hard to obtain better performance from parallelization. Indeed, the proposed solutions take advantage of the massively parallelism of GPUs but they are often asymptotically less efficient than the fastest CPU implementations. This paper presents BFS-4K, a parallel implementation of BFS for GPUs that exploits the more advanced features of GPU-based platforms (i.e., NVIDIA Kepler) and that achieves an asymptotically optimal work complexity. The paper presents different strategies implemented in BFS-4K to deal with the potential workload imbalance and thread divergence caused by any actual graph non-homogeneity. The paper presents the experimental results conducted on several graphs of different size and characteristics to understand how the proposed techniques are applied and combined to obtain the best performance from the parallel BFS visits. Finally, an analysis of the most representative BFS implementations for GPUs at the state of the art and their comparison with BFS-4K are reported to underline the efficiency of the proposed solution.

[1]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Parallel Scan for Stream Architectures , 2012 .

[2]  Kunle Olukotun,et al.  Accelerating CUDA graph algorithms at maximum warp , 2011, PPoPP '11.

[3]  Mark J. Harris,et al.  Optimizing Parallel Prefix Operations for the Fermi Architecture , 2012 .

[4]  P. J. Narayanan,et al.  Accelerating Large Graph Algorithms on the GPU Using CUDA , 2007, HiPC.

[5]  Andrew S. Grimshaw,et al.  Scalable GPU graph traversal , 2012, PPoPP '12.

[6]  David A. Bader,et al.  Scalable Graph Exploration on Multicore Processors , 2010, 2010 ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.

[7]  Guy E. Blelloch,et al.  Prefix sums and their applications , 1990 .

[8]  Wu-chun Feng,et al.  Inter-block GPU communication via fast barrier synchronization , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing (IPDPS).

[9]  Ulf Assarsson,et al.  Efficient stream compaction on wide SIMD many-core architectures , 2009, High Performance Graphics.

[10]  Dhirendra Pratap Singh,et al.  New Approach for Graph Algorithms on GPU using CUDA , 2013 .

[11]  Guy E. Blelloch,et al.  Scan primitives for vector computers , 1990, Proceedings SUPERCOMPUTING '90.

[12]  Jared Hoberock,et al.  Edge v. Node Parallelism for Graph Centrality Metrics , 2012 .

[13]  Fabrizio Petrini,et al.  Efficient Breadth-First Search on the Cell/BE Processor , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[14]  Robert E. Tarjan,et al.  A fast algorithm for finding dominators in a flowgraph , 1979, TOPL.

[15]  Charles E. Leiserson,et al.  A work-efficient parallel breadth-first search algorithm (or how to cope with the nondeterminism of reducers) , 2010, SPAA '10.

[16]  Yinglong Xia.  TOPOLOGICALLY ADAPTIVE PARALLEL BREADTH-FIRST SEARCH ON MULTICORE PROCESSORS , 2010 .

[17]  R. K. Shyamasundar,et al.  Introduction to algorithms , 1996 .

[18]  Yangdong Deng,et al.  Taming irregular EDA applications on GPUs , 2009, 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design - Digest of Technical Papers.

[19]  Naga K. Govindaraju,et al.  Fast scan algorithms on graphics processors , 2008, ICS '08.

[20]  Martin D. F. Wong,et al.  An effective GPU implementation of breadth-first search , 2010, Design Automation Conference.

[21]  Shubhabrata Sengupta,et al.  Efficient Parallel Scan Algorithms for GPUs , 2011 .

[22]  Guy E. Blelloch,et al.  Scans as Primitive Parallel Operations , 1989, ICPP.

[23]  Majid Sarrafzadeh,et al.  Fast Approximation Algorithms on Maxcut, k-Coloring, and k-Color Ordering vor VLSI Applications , 1998, IEEE Trans. Computers.