Design and Experimental Evaluation of Distributed Heterogeneous Graph-Processing Systems

Graph processing is increasingly used in a variety of domains, from engineering to logistics and from scientific computing to online gaming. To process graphs efficiently, GPU-enabled graph-processing systems such as TOTEM and Medusa exploit the GPU or the combined CPU+GPU capabilities of a single machine. Unlike scalable distributed CPU-based systems such as Pregel and GraphX, existing GPU-enabled systems are restricted to the resources of a single machine, including the limited amount of GPU memory, and thus cannot analyze the increasingly large-scale graphs we see in practice. To address this problem, we design and implement three families of distributed heterogeneous graph-processing systems that can use both the CPUs and GPUs of multiple machines. We further focus on graph partitioning, for which we compare existing graph-partitioning policies and a new policy specifically targeted at heterogeneity. We implement all our distributed heterogeneous systems based on the programming model of the single-machine TOTEM, to which we add (1) a new communication layer for CPUs and GPUs across multiple machines to support distributed graphs, and (2) a workload partitioning method that uses offline profiling to distribute the work on the CPUs and the GPUs. We conduct a comprehensive real-world performance evaluation for all three families. To ensure representative results, we select 3 typical algorithms and 5 datasets with different characteristics. Our results include algorithm run time, performance breakdown, scalability, graph partitioning time, and comparison with other graph-processing systems. They demonstrate the feasibility of distributed heterogeneous graph processing and show evidence of the high performance that can be achieved by combining CPUs and GPUs in a distributed environment.