A Reconfigurable Computing Approach for Efficient and Scalable Parallel Graph Exploration

In many application domains, data are represented using large graphs involving millions of vertices and billions of edges. Graph exploration algorithms, such as breadth-first search (BFS), are largely dominated by memory latency and are challenging to process efficiently. In this paper, we present a reconfigurable hardware methodology for efficient parallel processing of large-scale graph exploration problems. Our methodology is based on a reconfigurable hardware architecture which decouples computation and communication while keeping multiple memory requests in flight at any given time, taking advantage of the hardware capabilities of both FPGAs and the parallel memory subsystem. To validate our methodology, we provide a detailed design description of the Breadth-First Search algorithm on an FPGA-based high performance computing system. Using graph data based on the power-law graphs found in real-word problems, we are able to achieve performance results that are superior to those of high performance multi-core systems in the recent literature for large graph instances, and a throughput in excess of 2.5 billion traversed edges per second on RMAT graphs with 16 million vertices and over a billion edges. Using four Virtex-5 LX330 FPGAs based on 65nm technology and running at 75MHz, our BFS design achieves more than twice the speed of a 32-core Xeon X7560 based on 45nm technology and running at 2.26GHz.