Exploiting Parallelism and Vectorisation in Breadth-First Search for the Intel Xeon Phi

Modern applications generate massive amounts of data that is challenging to process or analyse. Graph algorithms have emerged as a solution for the analysis of such data because they can represent the entities participating in the generation of large-scale datasets in terms of vertices and their relationships in terms of edges. Graph analysis algorithms are used for finding patterns within these relationships, aiming to extract information to be further analysed. The
breadth-first search
(BFS) is one of the main graph search algorithms used for graph analysis and its optimisation has been widely researched using different parallel computers. However, the parallelisation of BFS has been shown to be challenging because of its inherent characteristics, including irregular memory access patterns, data dependencies and workload imbalance, that limit its scalability. This paper investigates the optimisation of the BFS on the Xeon Phi (Knights Corner), a modern parallel architecture provided with an advanced vector processor supporting the AVX-512 instruction set, using a bespoke development framework integrated with the Graph 500 benchmark. In addition, to demonstrate portability, we show results for a direct port of the algorithms to a more recent version of the Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) and to a Skylake CPU which supports most of the AVX-512 instruction set. Optimised parallel versions of two high-level algorithms for BFS were created using vectorisation, starting with the conventional
top-down
BFS algorithm and, building on this, a
hybrid
BFS algorithm. On the KNC our best implementations result in speedups of 1.37x (
top-down
) and 1.37x (
hybrid
), for a one million vertices graph, compared to the state-of-the-art. On the KNL and Skylake, the performance is higher than on KNC. In addition, we show results of our best
hybrid
algorithm on real-world graphs from the SNAP datasets with speedups up to 1.3x on KNC. Performance on KNL and Skylake is again higher, demonstrating the robustness and portability of our algorithm. The hybrid BFS algorithm can be further used to speed up other graph analysis algorithms and the lessons learned from vectorisation can be applied to other algorithms targeting existing and future models of the Xeon Phi and other advanced vector architectures.