There has been significant recent interest in parallel frameworks for processing graphs due to their applicability in studying social networks, the Web graph, networks in biology, and unstructured meshes in scientific simulation. Due to the desire to process large graphs, these systems have emphasized the ability to run on distributed memory machines. Today, however, a single multicore server can support more than a terabyte of memory, which can fit graphs with tens or even hundreds of billions of edges. Furthermore, for graph algorithms, shared-memory multicores are generally significantly more efficient on a per core, per dollar, and per joule basis than distributed memory systems, and shared-memory algorithms tend to be simpler than their distributed counterparts.In this paper, we present a lightweight graph processing framework that is specific for shared-memory parallel/multicore machines, which makes graph traversal algorithms easy to write. The framework has two very simple routines, one for mapping over edges and one for mapping over vertices. Our routines can be applied to any subset of the vertices, which makes the framework useful for many graph traversal algorithms that operate on subsets of the vertices. Based on recent ideas used in a very fast algorithm for breadth-first search (BFS), our routines automatically adapt to the density of vertex sets. We implement several algorithms in this framework, including BFS, graph radii estimation, graph connectivity, betweenness centrality, PageRank and single-source shortest paths. Our algorithms expressed using this framework are very simple and concise, and perform almost as well as highly optimized code. Furthermore, they get good speedups on a 40-core machine and are significantly more efficient than previously reported results using graph frameworks on machines with many more cores.

Ligra: a lightweight graph processing framework for shared memory

We report on new techniques we have developed for reconstructing phylogenies on whole genomes. Our mathematical techniques include new polynomial-time methods for bounding the inversion length of a candidate tree and new polynomial-time methods for estimating genomic distances which greatly improve the accuracy of neighbor-joining analyses. We demonstrate the power of these techniques through an extensive performance study based on simulating genome evolution under a wide range of model conditions. Combining these new tools with standard approaches (fast reconstruction with neighbor-joining, exploration of all possible refinements of strict consensus trees, etc.) has allowed us to analyze datasets that were previously considered computationally impractical. In particular, we have conducted a complete phylogenetic analysis of a subset of the Campanulaceae family, confirming various conjectures about the relationships among members of the subset and about the principal mechanism of evolution for their chloroplast genome. We give representative results of the extensive experimentation we conducted on both real and simulated datasets in order to validate and characterize our approaches. We find that our techniques provide very accurate reconstructions of the true tree topology even when the data are generated by processes that include a significant fraction of transpositions and when the data are close to saturation.

/pdf/new-approaches-for-reconstructing-phylogenies-from-gene-3v82wndvai.pdf

New approaches for reconstructing phylogenies from gene order data

Graph theoretic problems are representative of fundamental computations in traditional and emerging scientific disciplines like scientific computing and computational biology, as well as applications in national security We present our design and implementation of a graph theory application that supports the kernels from the Scalable Synthetic Compact Applications (SSCA) benchmark suite, developed under the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program This synthetic benchmark consists of four kernels that require irregular access to a large, directed, weighted multi-graph We have developed a parallel implementation of this benchmark in C using the POSIX thread library for commodity symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs) In this paper, we primarily discuss the data layout choices and algorithmic design issues for each kernel, and also present execution time and benchmark validation results

https://dislab.org/GraphHPC-2015/SSCA2-TechReport.pdf

Design and implementation of the HPCS graph analysis benchmark on symmetric multiprocessors

A fast, parallel spanning tree algorithm for symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs)

We present an experimental study of the single source shortest path problem with non-negative edge weights (NSSP) on large-scale graphs using the Δ-stepping parallel algorithm. We report performance results on the Cray MTA-2, a multithreaded parallel computer. The MTA-2 is a high-end shared memory system offering two unique features that aid the efficient parallel implementation of irregular algorithms: the ability to exploit fine-grained parallelism, and low-overhead synchronization primitives. Our implementation exhibits remarkable parallel speedup when compared with competitive sequential algorithms, for low-diameter sparse graphs. For instance, Δ-stepping on a directed scale-free graph of 100 million vertices and 1 billion edges takes less than ten seconds on 40 processors of the MTA-2, with a relative speedup of close to 30. To our knowledge, these are the first performance results of a shortest path problem on realistic graph instances in the order of billions of vertices and edges.

/pdf/an-experimental-study-of-a-parallel-shortest-path-algorithm-1ct053zt9n.pdf

An experimental study of a parallel shortest path algorithm for solving large-scale graph instances

The ability to provide uniform shared-memory access to a significant number of processors in a single SMP node brings us much closer to the ideal PRAM parallel computer. In this paper, we develop new techniques for designing a uniform shared-memory algorithm from a PRAM algorithm and present the results of an extensive experimental study demonstrating that the resulting programs scale nearly linearly across a significant range of processors and across the entire range of instance sizes tested. This linear speedup with the number of processors is one of the first ever attained in practice for intricate combinatorial problems. The example we present in detail here is for evaluating arithmetic expression trees using the algorithmic techniques of list ranking and tree contraction; this problem is not only of interest in its own right, but is representative of a large class of irregular combinatorial problems that have simple and efficient sequential implementations and fast PRAM algorithms, but have no known efficient parallel implementations. Our results thus offer promise for bridging the gap between the theory and practice of shared-memory parallel algorithms.

Evaluating arithmetic expressions using tree contraction: A fast and scalable parallel implementation for symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs)

The ability to provide uniform shared-memory access to a significant number of processors in a single SMP node brings us much closer to the ideal PRAM parallel computer. In this paper, we develop new techniques for designing a uniform shared-memory algorithm from a PRAM algorithm and present the results of an extensive experimental study demonstrating that the resulting programs scale nearly linearly across a significant range of processors (from 1 to 64) and across the entire range of instance sizes tested. This linear speedup with the number of processors is, to our knowledge, the first ever attained in practice for intricate combinatorial problems. The example we present in detail here is a graph decomposition algorithm that also requires the computation of a spanning tree; this problem is not only of interest in its own right, but is representative of a large class of irregular combinatorial problems that have simple and efficient sequential implementations and fast PRAM algorithms, but have no known efficient parallel implementations. Our results thus offer promise for bridging the gap between the theory and practice of shared-memory parallel algorithms.

/pdf/using-pram-algorithms-on-a-uniform-memory-access-shared-5auus9j612.pdf

Using PRAM Algorithms on a Uniform-Memory-Access Shared-Memory Architecture

Evaluating Arithmetic Expressions Using Tree Contraction: A Fast and Scalable Parallel Implementation for Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs)

Evaluating Arithmetic Expressions Using Tree Contraction: A Fast and Scalable Parallel Implementation for Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs) (Extended Abstract)

Nina R. Weisse-Bernstein

Papers

Evaluating arithmetic expressions using tree contraction: A fast and scalable parallel implementation for symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs)

Using PRAM Algorithms on a Uniform-Memory-Access Shared-Memory Architecture

Evaluating Arithmetic Expressions Using Tree Contraction: A Fast and Scalable Parallel Implementation for Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs)

Evaluating Arithmetic Expressions Using Tree Contraction: A Fast and Scalable Parallel Implementation for Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs) (Extended Abstract)