Accelerating All-Edge Common Neighbor Counting on Three Processors

We propose to accelerate an important but time-consuming operation in online graph analytics, which is the counting of common neighbors for each pair of adjacent vertices (u,v), or edge (u,v), on three modern processors of different architectures. We study two representative algorithms for this problem: (1) a merge-based pivot-skip algorithm (MPS) that intersects the two sets of neighbor vertices of each edge (u,v) to obtain the count; and (2) a bitmap-based algorithm (BMP), which dynamically constructs a bitmap index on the neighbor set of each vertex u, and for each neighbor v of u, looks up v's neighbors in u's bitmap. We parallelize and optimize both algorithms on a multicore CPU, an Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing processor (KNL), and an NVIDIA GPU. Our experiments show that (1) Both the CPU and the GPU favor BMP whereas MPS wins on the KNL; (2) Across all datasets, the best performer is either MPS on the KNL or BMP on the GPU; and (3) Our optimized algorithms can complete the operation within tens of seconds on billion-edge Twitter graphs, enabling online analytics.