ICSA PhD student Priyank Faldu has paper accepted at IEEE HPCA 2020

'Domain-Specialized Cache Management for Graph Analytics'

Congratulations to ICSA PhD student Priyank Faldu whose paper 'Domain-Specialized Cache Management for Graph Analytics' with his supervisor Boris Grot and his collaborator Jeff Diamond from Oracle Labs was accepted to IEEE HPCA 2020 Conference.

Short abstract

Graph analytics power a range of applications in areas as diverse as finance, networking and business logistics. A common property of graphs used in the domain of graph analytics is a power-law distribution of vertex connectivity, wherein a small number of vertices are responsible for a high fraction of all connections in the graph. These richly-connected, hot, vertices inherently exhibit high reuse. However, this work finds that state-of-the-art hardware cache management schemes struggle in capitalizing on their reuse due to highly irregular access patterns of graph analytics. In response, we propose GRASP, domain-specialized cache management at the last-level cache for graph analytics. GRASP augments existing cache policies to maximize reuse of hot vertices by protecting them against cache thrashing, while maintaining sufficient flexibility to capture the reuse of other vertices as needed. GRASP keeps hardware cost negligible by leveraging lightweight software support to pinpoint hot vertices, thus eliding the need for storage-intensive prediction mechanisms employed by state-of-the-art cache management schemes.

Useful links

HPCA 2020