GasCL: A vertex-centric graph model for GPUs

There are increasing research efforts of using GPUs for graph processing. Most prior work on accelerating GPGPU graph algorithms has been focused on algorithm and device-specific optimizations. There is little research on studying high-level programming models and associate run-time systems for graph processing on GPUs, which will be useful to solve diverse real-world problems flexibly. This paper presents a preliminary implementation of a graph framework, GasCL, supporting the well-known “think-like-a-vertex” programming model. The system is built on top of OpenCL and portable across diverse accelerators. We describe our design and use two applications as case studies. The initial performance result shows an average of 2.5× speedup on a GPU compared with a CPU.