Characterizing Betweenness Centrality Algorithm on Multi-core Architectures

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of characterization for an irregular application – computing betweenness centrality (BC) – on multi-core architectures. BC algorithm is widely used in large scale graph analysis applications, which play an increasingly important role in high performance computing community. Through a joint study of architecture and application, we find that dynamically non-contiguous memory access, unstructured parallelism and low arithmetic intensity in BC program pose an obstacle to an efficient execution on parallel architectures. The experimental results report a comparison between Intel Clovertown and Sun Niagara1 for running such irregular program. Finally, several implications on mulit-core architecture and programming are proposed.