The multilevel heuristic is an effective strategy for speeding up graph analytics, and graph coarsening is an integral step of multilevel methods. We perform a comprehensive study of multilevel coarsening in this work. We primarily focus on the graphics processing unit (GPU) parallelization of the Heavy Edge Coarsening (HEC) method executed in an iterative setting. We present optimizations for the two phases of coarsening, a fine-to-coarse vertex mapping phase, and a coarse graph construction phase. We also express several other coarsening algorithms using the Kokkos framework and discuss their parallelization. We demonstrate the efficacy of parallelized HEC on an NVIDIA Turing GPU and a 32-core AMD Ryzen processor using multilevel spectral graph partitioning as the primary case study.

MTTKRP is the bottleneck operation in algorithms used to compute the CP tensor decomposition. For sparse tensors, utilizing the compressed sparse fibers (CSF) storage format and the CSF-oriented MTTKRP algorithms is important for both memory and computational efficiency on distributed-memory architectures. Existing intelligent tensor partitioning models assume the computational cost of MTTKRP to be proportional to the total number of nonzeros in the tensor. However, this is not the case for the CSF-oriented MTTKRP on distributed-memory architectures. We outline two deficiencies of nonzero-based intelligent partitioning models when CSF-oriented MTTKRP operations are performed locally: failure to encode processors' computational loads and increase in total computation due to fiber fragmentation. We focus on existing fine-grain hypergraph model and propose a novel vertex weighting scheme that enables this model encode correct computational loads of processors. We also propose to augment the fine-grain model by fiber nets for reducing the increase in total computational load via minimizing fiber fragmentation. In this way, the proposed model encodes minimizing the load of the bottleneck processor. Parallel experiments with real-world sparse tensors on up to 1024 processors prove the validity of the outlined deficiencies and demonstrate the merit of our proposed improvements in terms of parallel runtimes.

The focus of this article is efficient parallelization of the canonical polyadic decomposition algorithm utilizing the alternating least squares method for sparse tensors on distributed-memory architectures. We propose a hypergraph model for general medium-grain partitioning which does not enforce any topological constraint on the partitioning. The proposed model is based on splitting the given tensor into nonzero-disjoint component tensors. Then a mode-dependent coarse-grain hypergraph is constructed for each component tensor. A net amalgamation operation is proposed to form a composite medium-grain hypergraph from these mode-dependent coarse-grain hypergraphs to correctly encapsulate the minimization of the communication volume. We propose a heuristic which splits the nonzeros of dense slices to obtain sparse slices in component tensors. So we partially attain slice coherency at (sub)slice level since partitioning is performed on (sub)slices instead of individual nonzeros. We also utilize the well-known recursive-bipartitioning framework to improve the quality of the splitting heuristic. Finally, we propose a medium-grain tripartite graph model with the aim of a faster partitioning at the expense of increasing the total communication volume. Parallel experiments conducted on 10 real-world tensors on up to 1024 processors confirm the validity of the proposed hypergraph and graph models.

Communication hypergraph model was proposed in a two-phase setting for encapsulating multiple communication cost metrics (bandwidth and latency), which are proven to be important in parallelizing irregular applications. In the first phase, computational-task-to-processor assignment is performed with the objective of minimizing total volume while maintaining computational load balance. In the second phase, communication-task-to-processor assignment is performed with the objective of minimizing total number of messages while maintaining communication-volume balance. The reduce-communication hypergraph model suffers from failing to correctly encapsulate send-volume balancing. We propose a novel vertex weighting scheme that enables part weights to correctly encode send-volume loads of processors for send-volume balancing. The model also suffers from increasing the total communication volume during partitioning. To decrease this increase, we propose a method that utilizes the recursive bipartitioning framework and refines each bipartition by vertex swaps. For performance evaluation, we consider column-parallel SpMV, which is one of the most widely known applications in which the reduce-task assignment problem arises. Extensive experiments on 313 matrices show that, compared to the existing model, the proposed models achieve considerable improvements in all communication cost metrics. These improvements lead to an average decrease of 30 percent in parallel SpMV time on 512 processors for 70 matrices with high irregularity.

Tensor decomposition is widely used in the analysis of multi-dimensional data. The canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) is one of the most popular decomposition methods and commonly found by the CPD-ALS algorithm. High computational and memory costs of CPD-ALS necessitate the use of a distributed-memory-parallel algorithm for efficiency. The medium-grain CPD-ALS algorithm, which adopts multi-dimensional cartesian tensor partitioning, is one of the most successful distributed CPD-ALS algorithms for sparse tensors. This is because cartesian partitioning imposes nice upper bounds on communication overheads. However, this model does not utilize the sparsity pattern of the tensor to reduce the total communication volume. The objective of this work is to fill this literature gap. We propose a novel hypergraph-partitioning model, CartHP, whose partitioning objective correctly encapsulates the minimization of total communication volume of multi-dimensional cartesian tensor partitioning. Experiments on twelve real-world tensors using up to 1024 processors validate the effectiveness of the proposed CartHP model. Compared to the baseline medium-grain model, CartHP achieves average reductions of 52, 43 and 24 percent in total communication volume, communication time and overall runtime of CPD-ALS, respectively.

Intelligent partitioning models are commonly used for efficient parallelization of irregular applications on distributed systems. These models usually aim to minimize a single communication cost metric, which is either related to communication volume or message count. However, both volume- and message-related metrics should be taken into account during partitioning for a more efficient parallelization. There are only a few works that consider both of them and they usually address each in separate phases of a two-phase approach. In this work, we propose a recursive hypergraph bipartitioning framework that reduces the total volume and total message count in a single phase. In this framework, the standard hypergraph models, nets of which already capture the bandwidth cost, are augmented with message nets. The message nets encode the message count so that minimizing conventional cutsize captures the minimization of bandwidth and latency costs together. Our model provides a more accurate representation of the overall communication cost by incorporating both the bandwidth and the latency components into the partitioning objective. The use of the widely-adopted successful recursive bipartitioning framework provides the flexibility of using any existing hypergraph partitioner. The experiments on instances from different domains show that our model on the average achieves up to 52 percent reduction in total message count and hence results in 29 percent reduction in parallel running time compared to the model that considers only the total volume.

We propose a comprehensive and generic framework to minimize multiple and different volume-based communication cost metrics for sparse matrix dense matrix multiplication (SpMM). SpMM is an important kernel that finds application in computational linear algebra and big data analytics. On distributed memory systems, this kernel is usually characterized with its high communication volume requirements. Our approach targets irregularly sparse matrices and is based on both graph and hypergraph partitioning models that rely on the widely adopted recursive bipartitioning paradigm. The proposed models are lightweight, portable (can be realized using any graph and hypergraph partitioning tool) and can simultaneously optimize different cost metrics besides total volume, such as maximum send/receive volume, maximum sum of send and receive volumes, etc., in a single partitioning phase. They allow one to define and optimize as many custom volume-based metrics as desired through a flexible formulation. The experiments on a wide range of about thousand matrices show that the proposed models drastically reduce the maximum communication volume compared to the standard partitioning models that only address the minimization of total volume. The improvements obtained on volume-based partition quality metrics using our models are validated with parallel SpMM as well as parallel multi-source BFS experiments on two large-scale systems. For parallel SpMM, compared to the standard partitioning models, our graph and hypergraph partitioning models respectively achieve reductions of 14% and 22% in runtime, on average. Compared to the state-of-the-art partitioner UMPa, our graph model is overall 14.5 × faster and achieves an average improvement of 19% in the partition quality on instances that are bounded by maximum volume. For parallel BFS, we show on graphs with more than a billion edges that the scalability can significantly be improved with our models compared to a recently proposed two-dimensional partitioning model.