Software-Defined Floating-Point Number Formats and Their Application to Graph Processing – ICS’22

DOI: 10.1145/3524059.3532360

This paper proposes software-defined floating-point number formats for graph processing workloads, which can improve performance in irregular workloads by reducing cache misses. Efficient arithmetic on software-defined number formats is challenging, even when based on conversion to wider, hardware-supported formats. We derive efficient conversion schemes that are tuned to the IA64 and AVX512 instruction sets.

We demonstrate that: (i) reduced-precision number formats can be applied to graph processing without loss of accuracy; (ii) conversion of floating-point values is possible
with minimal instructions; (iii) conversions are most efficient when utilizing vectorized instruction sets, specifically on IA64 processors.

Experiments on twelve real-world graph data sets demonstrate that our techniques result in speedups up to 89% for PageRank and Accelerated PageRank, and up to 35% for Single-Source Shortest Paths. The same techniques help to accelerate the integer-based maximal independent set problem by up to 262%.

Graptor Sources Published

Finally got around to this: publishing the Graptor source code. With time passing, the code has changed quite a bit compared to that used in the paper: Graptor: efficient pull and push style vectorized graph processing. The evolution of the code has advantages: it’s faster. There are also disadvantages: not all versions and variations of the code that were experimented with can still be compiled.

The source code can be found here: https://github.com/hvdieren/graptor

There will likely be issues (errors, lack of documentation, …) as this is experimental research code. Drop me a line if you need a hand h {a dot} vandierendonck {an at} qub {another dot} ac {the last dot} uk .