Talk at UKMAC 2017

On July 11th, Hans gave a talk on “GraphGrind: Taming Irregular Memory Accesses in Graph Analytics Workloads” at the UK ManyCore workshop https://manycore.org.uk/ukmac2017.html

The analysis of graph-structured data is gaining importance due to its relevance to social media and big data. Due to the interconnection patterns in social network graphs, the performance of graph analytics is impeded by irregular memory accesses patterns which expose memory latency. 
This talk presents our recent work on high-performance graph analytics. We will demonstrate how graph partitioning is crucial to tame memory locality and how it can be used to map graph analytics to non-uniform memory architectures (NUMA). Key to the graph partitioning algorithm is that it achieves memory locality, avoids overlap in write-sets between threads and is efficient to apply. We will discuss the difficulties of making graph partitioning scalable as a result of a strongly biased degree distribution in the partitions. We will demonstrate solutions to these problems. We will moreover identify new opportunities to switch between different representations of the graph during graph traversal in order to maximise processing speed. 
These ideas are implemented in GraphGrind, an open source framework for graph analytics on shared memory systems.