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Medusa: Building GPU-based Parallel Sparse Graph Applications with Sequential C/C++ Code

Introduction

The graphics processing unit (GPU) has been adopted to accelerate sparse graph processing algorithms such as BFS and shortest path. However, it is difficult to write correct and efficient GPU programs and even more difficult for graph processing due to the irregularities of graph structures. To simplify graph processing on GPUs, we introduce Medusa, a programming framework which enables developers to leverage the capabilities of GPUs by writing sequential C/C++ code. Medusa focuses on sparse graph, which is more challenging than the dense graph for GPU processing, due to its more irregular computation and memory access patterns.

Medusa offers a small set of user-defined APIs, and embraces a runtime system to automatically execute those APIs in parallel on the GPUs. We further develop a series of graph-centric optimizations based on the architecture features of GPU for efficiency. Additionally, Medusa is extended to execute on multiple GPUs within a machine or a cluster. Our empirical studies demonstrate the programmability and efficiency of Medusa for a series of common graph operations.

Platform

The current version of Medusa is implemented using the following platform.

• Programming Language - CUDA 7.5, C++03
• Build - MS Visual Studio/gcc, CUDA nvcc

Datasets

We provide a set of graph files to test Medusa. These graphs are also used in our papers. The graph files are stored in the GTGraph output format.

• random.1mv.16me
• Wikitalk
• rmat.1mv.16me
• roadNet-CA

Project News

• [2012-8-23] Medusa is now on Google Code.
• [2012-8-29] Technical Report on the design and implementation of Medusa is available.
• [2012-8-30] First release (Version 0.1) of Medusa source code available.
• [2013-2-28] Version 0.2 now available.
• [2014-3-12] C Code for coverting a GTGraph format graph to a METIS format graph.
• [2015-3-14] Migrate project from google code to GitHub.

Publications

1. Jianlong Zhong, Bingsheng He, Towards GPU-Accelerated Large-Scale Graph Processing in the Cloud. CloudCom 2013.
2. Jianlong Zhong, Bingsheng He, Kernelet: High-Throughput GPU Kernel Executions with Dynamic Slicing and Scheduling. Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2013.
3. Jianlong Zhong, Bingsheng He, Parallel Graph Processing on Graphics Processors Made Easy. Accepted by VLDB 2013, Demonstrations Track.
4. Jianlong Zhong, Bingsheng He, Medusa: Simplified Graph Processing on GPUs. Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, April, 2013..
5. Jianlong Zhong, Bingsheng He, An overview of Medusa: simplified graph processing on GPUs. PPoPP 2012: Proceedings of 17th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (Poster paper, 2 pages).
6. Jiangming Jin, Stephen John Turner, Bu-Sung Lee, Jianlong Zhong, Bingsheng He, HPC Simulations of Information Propagation Over Social Networks. Procedia CS 9: 292-301 (2012).
7. Jianlong Zhong, Bingsheng He, GViewer: GPU-Accelerated Graph Visualization and Mining. SocInfo? 2011: 304-307。

More Recent Projects on Parallel & Distributed Graph Processing

• Google Pregel
• GraphLab
• GPS: A Graph Processing System

Medusa was developed by Jianlong Zhong at the Parallel and Distributed Computing Center, Nanyang Technological University.