A Data-Centric Software-Hardware Co-Designed Architecture for Large-Scale Graph Processing

Abstract

Graph processing plays an important role in many practical applications. However, the inherent characteristics of graph processing, including random memory access and the low computation-to-communication ratio, make it difficult to efficiently execute on traditional computing architectures, such as CPUs and GPUs. Near-memory computing has the characteristics of low latency and high bandwidth. It is widely regarded as a promising direction for designing graph processing accelerators. However, the storage space of a single device cannot meet the demand of large-scale graph processing. Using multiple devices will bring lots of inter-device data transmission, which may counteract the benefits of near-memory computing. To fundamentally reduce the data transmission overhead, we propose a data-centric graph processing framework for systems with multiple near-memory computing devices. The framework uses a data-centric programming model as the software hardware interface. For software, we propose an optimized data flow and a heuristic multi-step weighted maximum matching algorithm to achieve efficient inter-device communication and ensure load balancing. For hardware, we design a data reuse driven task controller and a data type-aware on-chip memory, which can effectively improve the utilization of the on-chip memory. Compared with the two most recent near-memory graph accelerators, our framework significantly reduces energy consumption and inter-device communication.