Dr. BFS: Data Centric Breadth-First Search on FPGAs

The flexible architectures of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) lend themselves to an array of data analytical applications, among which Breadth-First Search (BFS), due to its vital importance, draws particular attention. Recent attempts that offload BFS on FPGAs either simply imitate the existing CPU-or Graphics Processing Units (GPU)-based mechanisms or suffer from scalability issues. To this end, we introduce a novel data centric design which extensively extracts the potential of FPGAs for BFS with the following two techniques. First, we advocate to partition and compress the BFS algorithmic metadata in order to buffer them in fast on-chip memory and circumvent the expensive metadata access. Second, we propose a hierarchical coalescing method to improve the throughput of graph data access. Taken together, our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed design achieves, on average, 1.6x and 2.2x speedups over the state-of-the-art FPGA designs TorusBFS and Umuroglu, respectively, across a collection of graph datasets.