Exploring Parallel Algorithmic Choices for Graph Analytics

Sequential graph algorithms are implemented through ordered execution of tasks to achieve high work efficiency. Exposing parallelism in these ordered workloads tends to be an elusive problem. Strict-ordered parallel implementations find nodes that don’t have read-write dependencies and hence can be executed in parallel. They have the work efficiency of their sequential counter-parts due to strict ordering constraints. Larger amount of parallelism can be achieved at the expense of redundant work. Relax-ordered implementations remove the global order and only impose the local order. They go through multiple iterations and have the property of monotonically increasing or decreasing output values allowing them to converge efficiently. Unordered implementations move one step ahead and remove the local order as well. Due to the absence of the order, a large amount of redundant work is done but at the same time more parallelism is exposed. Different parallel implementations perform optimally for different algorithms. Similarly, as the graph input changes, the optimal parallel version may change. The choice of optimal parallel implementations is strongly correlated with the characteristics of graph benchmark and input. This work proposes an analytical prediction model that chooses the optimal parallel im-