Domino: An Asynchronous and Energy-efficient Accelerator for Graph Processing

Abstract

Large-scale graphs processing, which draws attentions of researchers, applies in a large range of domains, such as social networks, web graphs, and transport networks. However, processing large-scale graphs on general processors suffers from difficulties including computation and memory inefficiency. Therefore, the research of hardware accelerator for graph processing has become a hot issue recently. Meanwhile, as a power-efficiency and reconfigurable resource, FPGA is a potential solution to design and employ graph processing algorithms. In this paper, we propose Domino, an asynchronous and energy-efficient hardware accelerator for graph processing. Domino adopts the asynchronous model to process graphs, which is efficient for most of the graph algorithms, such as Breadth-First Search, Depth-First Search, and Single Source Shortest Path. Domino also proposes a specific data structure based on row vector, named Batch Row Vector, to present graphs. Our work adopts the naive update mechanism and bisect update mechanism to perform asynchronous control. Ultimately, we implement Domino on an advanced Xilinx Virtex-7 board, and experimental results demonstrate that Domino has significant performance and energy improvement, especially for graphs with a large diameter(e.g., roadNet-CA and USA-Road). Case studies in Domino achieve 1.47x-7.84x and 0.47x-2.52x average speedup for small-diameter graphs(e.g., com-youtube, WikiTalk, and soc-LiveJournal), over GraphChi on the Intel Core2 and Core i7 processors, respectively. Besides, compared to Intel Core i7 processors, Domino also performs significant energy-efficiency that is 2.03x-10.08x for three small-diameter graphs and 27.98x-134.50x for roadNet-CA which is a graph with relatively large diameter.