Falcon: A Graph Manipulation Language for Heterogeneous Systems

TLDR: A domain-specific language (DSL) is proposed, Falcon, for implementing graph algorithms that abstracts the hardware, provides constructs to write explicitly parallel programs at a higher level, and can work with general algorithms that may change the graph structure.

Abstract: Graph algorithms have been shown to possess enough parallelism to keep several computing resources busy—even hundreds of cores on a GPU. Unfortunately, tuning their implementation for efficient execution on a particular hardware configuration of heterogeneous systems consisting of multicore CPUs and GPUs is challenging, time consuming, and error prone. To address these issues, we propose a domain-specific language (DSL), Falcon, for implementing graph algorithms that (i) abstracts the hardware, (ii) provides constructs to write explicitly parallel programs at a higher level, and (iii) can work with general algorithms that may change the graph structure (morph algorithms). We illustrate the usage of our DSL to implement local computation algorithms (that do not change the graph structure) and morph algorithms such as Delaunay mesh refinement, survey propagation, and dynamic SSSP on GPU and multicore CPUs. Using a set of benchmark graphs, we illustrate that the generated code performs close to the state-of-the-art hand-tuned implementations.