Scalable and performant graph processing on GPUs using approximate computing

Graph algorithms are being widely used in several application domains. It has been established that parallelizing graph algorithms is challenging. The parallelization issues get exacerbated when graphics processing units (GPUs) are used to execute graph algorithms. While the prior art has shown effective parallelization of several graph algorithms on GPUs, a few algorithms are still expensive. In this work, we address the scalability issues in graph parallelization. In particular, we aim to improve the execution time by tolerating a little approximation in the computation. We study the effects of four heuristic approximations on six graph algorithms with five graphs and show that if an application allows for small inaccuracy, this can be leveraged to achieve considerable performance benefits. We also study the effects of the approximations on GPU-based processing and provide interesting takeaways.