ReGraph: Scaling Graph Processing on HBM-enabled FPGAs with Heterogeneous Pipelines

The use of FPGAs for efficient graph processing has attracted significant interest. Recent memory subsystem upgrades including the introduction of HBM in FPGAs promise to further alleviate memory bottlenecks. However, modern multi-channel HBM requires much more processing pipelines to fully utilize its bandwidth potential. Existing designs do not scale well, resulting in underutilization of the HBM facilities even when all other resources are fully consumed.

In this paper, we re-examined the graph processing workloads and found much diversity in processing. We also found that the diverse workloads can be easily classified into two types, namely dense and sparse partitions. This motivates us to propose a resource-efficient heterogeneous pipeline architecture. Our heterogeneous architecture comprises of two types of pipelines: Little pipelines to process dense partitions with good locality and Big pipelines to process sparse partitions with extremely poor locality. Unlike traditional monolithic pipeline designs, the heterogeneous pipelines are tailored for more specific memory access patterns, and hence are more lightweight, allowing the architecture to scale up more effectively with limited resources. In addition, we propose a model-guided task scheduling method that schedules partitions to the right pipeline types, generates the most efficient pipeline combination and balances workloads. Furthermore, we develop an automated open-source framework, called ReGraph 1 , which automates the entire development process. ReGraph outperforms state-of-the-art FPGA accelerators by up to 5.9× in terms of performance and 12× in terms of resource efficiency.