Graphie: Large-Scale Asynchronous Graph Traversals on Just a GPU

TLDR: Graphie, a system to efficiently traverse large-scale graphs on a single GPU that stores the vertex attribute data in the GPU memory and streams edge data asynchronously to the GPU for processing, and relies on two renaming algorithms for high performance.

Abstract: Most GPU-based graph systems cannot handle large-scale graphs that do not fit in the GPU memory. The ever-increasing graph size demands a scale-up graph system, which can run on a single GPU with optimized memory access efficiency and well-controlled data transfer overhead. However, existing systems either incur redundant data transfers or fail to use shared memory. In this paper we present Graphie, a systemto efficiently traverse large-scale graphs on a single GPU. Graphie stores the vertex attribute data in the GPU memory and streams edge data asynchronously to the GPU for processing. Graphie's high performance relies on two renaming algorithms. The first algorithm renames the vertices so that the source vertices can be easily loaded to the shared memory to reduce global memory accesses. The second algorithm inserts virtual vertices into the vertex set to rename real vertices, which enables the use of a small boolean array to track active partitions. The boolean array also resides in shared memory and can be updated in constant time. The renaming algorithms do not introduce any extra overhead in the GPU memory or graph storage on disk. Graphie's runtime overlaps data transfer with kernel execution and reuses transferred data in the GPU memory. The evaluation of Graphie on 7 real-world graphs with up to 1.8 billion edgesdemonstrates substantial speedups over X-Stream, a state-of-theart edge-centric graph processing framework on the CPU, and GraphReduce, an out-of-memory graph processing systems on GPUs.