Analyzing hybrid architectures for massively parallel graph analysis

• Main Author: Ediger, David
• Published: Georgia Institute of Technology 2013
• Subjects: Data intensive computing; Computer architectures; Cray XMT; Streaming graph algorithms; Multithreaded graph algorithms; Parallel processing (Electronic computers); Computer algorithms; Graph algorithms; Parallel algorithms
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/47659

The quantity of rich, semi-structured data generated by sensor networks, scientific simulation, business activity, and the Internet grows daily. The objective of this research is to investigate architectural requirements for emerging applications in massive graph analysis. Using emerging hybrid systems, we will map applications to architectures and close the loop between software and hardware design in this application space. Parallel algorithms and specialized machine architectures are necessary to handle the immense size and rate of change of today's graph data. To highlight the impact of this work, we describe a number of relevant application areas ranging from biology to business and cybersecurity. With several proposed architectures for massively parallel graph analysis, we investigate the interplay of hardware, algorithm, data, and programming model through real-world experiments and simulations. We demonstrate techniques for obtaining parallel scaling on multithreaded systems using graph algorithms that are orders of magnitude faster and larger than the state of the art. The outcome of this work is a proposed hybrid architecture for massive-scale analytics that leverages key aspects of data-parallel and highly multithreaded systems. In simulations, the hybrid systems incorporating a mix of multithreaded, shared memory systems and solid state disks performed up to twice as fast as either homogeneous system alone on graphs with as many as 18 trillion edges.