Accelerating Graph Analytics by Co-Optimizing Storage and Access on an FPGA-HMC Platform

Abstract

Graph analytics, which explores the relationships among interconnected entities, is becoming increasingly important due to its broad applicability, from machine learning to social sciences. However, due to the irregular data access patterns in graph computations, one major challenge for graph processing systems is performance. The algorithms, softwares, and hardwares that have been tailored for mainstream parallel applications are generally not effective for massive, sparse graphs from the real-world problems, due to their complex and irregular structures. To address the performance issues in large-scale graph analytics, we leverage the exceptional random access performance of the emerging Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) combined with the flexibility and efficiency of modern FPGAs. In particular, we develop a collaborative software/hardware technique to perform a level-synchronized Breadth First Search (BFS) on a FPGA-HMC platform. From the software perspective, we develop an architecture-aware graph clustering algorithm that exploits the FPGA-HMC platform»s capability to improve data locality and memory access efficiency. From the hardware perspective, we further improve the FPGA-HMC graph processor architecture by designing a memory request merging unit to take advantage of the increased data locality resulting from graph clustering. We evaluate the performance of our BFS implementation using the AC-510 development kit from Micron and achieve $2.8 \times$ average performance improvement compared to the latest FPGA-HMC based graph processing system over a set of benchmarks from a wide range of applications.