Probabilistic breadth-first traversals (BPTs) are used in many network science and graph machine learning applications. In this paper, we are motivated by the application of BPTs in stochastic diffusion-based graph problems such as influence maximization. These applications heavily rely on BPTs to implement a Monte-Carlo sampling step for their approximations. Given the large sampling complexity, stochasticity of the diffusion process, and the inherent irregularity in real-world graph topologies, efficiently parallelizing these BPTs remains significantly challenging. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to fuse massive number of concurrently executing BPTs with random starts on the input graph. Our algorithm is designed to fuse BPTs by combining separate traversals into a unified frontier on distributed multi-GPU systems. To show the general applicability of the fused BPT technique, we have incorporated it into two state-of-the-art influence maximization parallel implementations (gIM and Ripples). Our experiments on up to 4K nodes of the OLCF Frontier supercomputer (32,768 GPUs and 196K CPU cores) show strong scaling behavior, and that fused BPTs can improve the performance of these implementations up to 34× (for gIM) and ~360× (for Ripples).
@article{arxiv.2311.10201,
title = {Fused Breadth-First Probabilistic Traversals on Distributed GPU Systems},
author = {Reece Neff and Mostafa Eghbali Zarch and Marco Minutoli and Mahantesh Halappanavar and Antonino Tumeo and Ananth Kalyanaraman and Michela Becchi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.10201},
year = {2024}
}