Guest Editorial: Advances in Parallel Graph Processing: Algorithms, Architectures, and Application Frameworks

Abstract

The papers in this special section explore recent advancements in parallel graph processing. In the sphere of modern data science and data-driven applications, graph algorithms have achieved a pivotal place in advancing the state of scientific discovery and knowledge. Nearly three centuries of ideas have made graph theory and its applications a mature area in computational sciences. Yet, today we find ourselves at a crossroads between theory and application. Spurred by the digital revolution, data from a diverse range of high throughput channels and devices, from across internet-scale applications, are starting to mark a new era in data-driven computing and discovery. Building robust graph models and implementing scalable graph application frameworks in the context of this new era are proving to be significant challenges. Concomitant to the digital revolution, we have also experienced an explosion in computing architectures, with a broad range of multicores, manycores, heterogeneous platforms, and hardware accelerators (CPUs, GPUs) being actively developed and deployed within servers and multinode clusters. Recent advances have started to show that in more than one way, these two fields—graph theory and architectures–are capable of benefiting and in fact spurring new research directions in one another. This special section is aimed at introducing some of the new avenues of cutting-edge research happening at the intersection of graph algorithm design and their implementation on advanced parallel architectures.