ForeGraph: Exploring Large-scale Graph Processing on Multi-FPGA Architecture

The performance of large-scale graph processing suffers from challenges including poor locality, lack of scalability, random access pattern, and heavy data conflicts. Some characteristics of FPGA make it a promising solution to accelerate various applications. For example, on-chip block RAMs can provide high throughput for random data access. However, large-scale processing on a single FPGA chip is constrained by limited on-chip memory resources and off-chip bandwidth. Using a multi-FPGA architecture may alleviate these problems to some extent, while the data partitioning and communication schemes should be considered to ensure the locality and reduce data conflicts. In this paper, we propose ForeGraph, a large-scale graph processing framework based on the multi-FPGA architecture. In ForeGraph, each FPGA board only stores a partition of the entire graph in off-chip memory. Communication over partitions is reduced. Vertices and edges are sequentially loaded onto the FPGA chip and processed. Under our scheduling scheme, each FPGA chip performs graph processing in parallel without conflicts. We also analyze the impact of system parameters on the performance of ForeGraph. Our experimental results on Xilinx Virtex UltraScale XCVU190 chip show ForeGraph outperforms state-of-the-art FPGA-based large-scale graph processing systems by 4.54x when executing PageRank on the Twitter graph (1.4 billion edges). The average throughput is over 900 MTEPS in our design and 2.03x larger than previous work.