# Graph Coloring: More Parallelism for Incomplete-LU Factorization

In this blog post I will briefly discuss the importance and simplicity of graph coloring and its application to one of the most common problems in sparse linear algebra – the incomplete-LU factorization. My goal is to convince you that graph coloring is a problem that is well-suited for GPUs and that it should be viewed as a tool that can be used to expose latent parallelism even in cases where it is not obvious. In fact, I will apply this tool to expose additional parallelism in one of the most popular black-box preconditioners/smoothers—the incomplete-LU factorization—which is used in many applications, including Computational Fluid Dynamics; Computer-Aided Design, Manufacturing, and Engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE); and Seismic Exploration (Figure 1).

## What is Graph Coloring?

In general, graph coloring refers to the problem of finding the minimum number of colors that can be used to color the nodes of a graph, such that no two adjacent (connected) nodes have the same color. For example, the graph in Figure 2 can be colored with two colors (green and yellow).

Why is this mathematical problem of interest to us? Well, imagine that each node in the graph represents a task and each edge represents a dependency between two tasks. Then, graph coloring tells us which tasks are independent. Assuming that the edges have no particular direction assigned to them, we can process the tasks with the same color in parallel (they are independent by construction), perform a barrier, and proceed to the next set of tasks that are identified by a different color. Not all problems can be mapped to such a framework, but many are amenable to it.

The next question we should answer is how difficult is it to perform graph coloring? Now that the cuSPARSE routine provides a graph coloring implementation in the csrcolor() routine, for most users it is trivially easy. But in this post I want to talk about implementing the algorithm itself in a bit more detail.

It is well-known that finding the best solution to this problem is NP-complete. However, there are many parallel algorithms that can find an approximate solution very quickly. Indeed, the exact solution is often not even required, as long as we obtain enough parallelism to fully utilize our parallel computing platform. Continue reading

# GPU-Accelerated Graph Analytics in Python with Numba

Numba is an open-source just-in-time (JIT) Python compiler that generates native machine code for X86 CPU and CUDA GPU from annotated Python Code. (Mark Harris introduced Numba in the post “NumbaPro: High-Performance Python with CUDA Acceleration”.) Numba specializes in Python code that makes heavy use of NumPy arrays and loops. In addition to JIT compiling NumPy array code for the CPU or GPU, Numba exposes “CUDA Python”: the CUDA programming model for NVIDIA GPUs in Python syntax.

By speeding up Python, we extend its ability from a glue language to a complete programming environment that can execute numeric code efficiently.

## From Prototype to Full Dataset with @cuda.jit

When doing exploratory programming, the interactivity of IPython Notebook and a comprehensive collection of scientific libraries (e.g. SciPy, Scikit-Learn, Theano, etc.) allow data scientists to process and visualize their data quickly. There are times when a fast implementation of what you need isn’t in a library, and you have to implement something new. Numba helps by letting you write pure Python code and run it with speed comparable to a compiled language, like C++. Your development cycle shortens when your prototype Python code can scale to process the full dataset in a reasonable amount of time.

Working with Dr. Alex Dimakis and his team at UT Austin, we implemented their densest-k-subgraph (DkS) algorithm [1]. Our goal was to extract the densest domain from the 2012 WebDataCommon pay-level-domain hyperlink graph using one NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerator. We developed the entire application using NumPy for array operations, Numba to JIT compile Python to CUDA, NumbaPro for GPU sorting and cuBLAS routines, and Bokeh for plotting the results. Continue reading

# Accelerating Graph Betweenness Centrality with CUDA

Graph analysis is a fundamental tool for domains as diverse as social networks, computational biology, and machine learning. Real-world applications of graph algorithms involve tremendously large networks that cannot be inspected manually. Betweenness Centrality (BC) is a popular analytic that determines vertex influence in a graph. It has many practical use cases, including finding the best locations for stores within cities, power grid contingency analysis, and community detection. Unfortunately, the fastest known algorithm for computing betweenness centrality has $O(mn)$ time complexity for graphs with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, making the analysis of large networks challenging.

This post describes how we used CUDA and NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate the BC computation, and how choosing efficient parallelization strategies results in an average speedup of 2.7x, and more than 10x speedup for road networks and meshes versus a naïve edge-parallel strategy.

Betweenness Centrality determines the importance of vertices in a network by measuring the ratio of shortest paths passing through a particular vertex to the total number of shortest paths between all pairs of vertices. Intuitively, this ratio determines how well a vertex connects pairs of vertices in the network. Formally, the Betweenness Centrality of a vertex $v$ is defined as:

$BC(v) = \sum_{s \neq t \neq v} \frac{\sigma_{st}(v)}{\sigma_{st}}$

where $\sigma_{st}$ is the number of shortest paths between vertices $s$ and $t$ and $\sigma_{st}(v)$ is the number of those shortest paths that pass through $v$. Consider Figure 1 above. Vertex 4 is the only vertex that lies on paths from its left (vertices 5 through 9) to its right (vertices 1 through 3). Hence vertex 4 lies on all the shortest paths between these pairs of vertices and has a high BC score. In contrast, vertex 9 does not belong on a path between any pair of the remaining vertices and thus it has a BC score of 0. Continue reading