Accelerating Force-Directed Graph Drawing with RT Cores
Data Structures and Algorithms
2020-08-27 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Abstract
Graph drawing with spring embedders employs a V x V computation phase over the graph's vertex set to compute repulsive forces. Here, the efficacy of forces diminishes with distance: a vertex can effectively only influence other vertices in a certain radius around its position. Therefore, the algorithm lends itself to an implementation using search data structures to reduce the runtime complexity. NVIDIA RT cores implement hierarchical tree traversal in hardware. We show how to map the problem of finding graph layouts with force-directed methods to a ray tracing problem that can subsequently be implemented with dedicated ray tracing hardware. With that, we observe speedups of 4x to 13x over a CUDA software implementation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2008.11235,
title = {Accelerating Force-Directed Graph Drawing with RT Cores},
author = {Stefan Zellmann and Martin Weier and Ingo Wald},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.11235},
year = {2020}
}