Title: GraphIt: A Domain-Specific Language for Writing High-Performance Graph Applications

Abstract: In recent years, large graphs with billions of vertices and trillions of edges have emerged in many domains, such as social network analytics, machine learning, physical simulations, and biology. There is a strong demand for a programming system that allows domain experts to easily write applications that run quickly on these large graphs. However, programming high-performance graph applications is a challenging problem. The performance bottlenecks of graph applications depend on the algorithm, the size and structure of the graph, and the underlying hardware. There is not a set of optimizations that work well across all algorithms, graphs, and hardwares. Additionally, domain experts are often not familiar with low-level implementation details, such as atomic instructions and bit manipulations, needed for today's high-performance graph frameworks.

In this talk, I will present our work on GraphIt, a new domain-specific language (DSL) that offers an easy-to-use programming model, achieves consistent high-performance across different algorithms and graphs, and supports both unordered and ordered graph algorithms. GraphIt decouples algorithms from performance optimizations (schedules) for graph applications to make it easy to explore a large space of performance optimizations. The compiler leverages a new graph iteration space model to generate fast code for different combinations of optimizations. We also introduce new priority-based extensions to support ordered graph algorithms and are working on code generation for GPU architectures.

Bio: Yunming Zhang is a sixth year PhD student at MIT working with Saman Amarasinghe and Julian Shun. He works on domain-specific compilers, languages and performance optimizations for large-scale data analytics applications.