Edge-Connected Jaccard Similarity for Graph Link Prediction on FPGA

Graph analysis is a critical task in many fields, such as social networking, epidemiology, bioinformatics, and fraud de-tection. In particular, understanding and inferring relationships between graph elements lies at the core of many graph-based workloads. Real-world graph workloads and their associated data structures create irregular computational patterns that compli-cate the realization of high-performance kernels. Given these complications, there does not exist a de facto 'best' architecture, language, or algorithmic approach that simultaneously balances performance, energy efficiency, portability, and productivity. In this paper, we realize different algorithms of edge-connected Jaccard similarity for graph link prediction and characterize their performance across a broad spectrum of graphs on an Intel Stratix 10 FPGA. By utilizing a high-level synthesis (HLS)-driven, high-productivity approach (via the C++-based SYCL language) we rapidly prototype two implementations - a from-scratch edge-centric version and a faithfully-ported commodity GPU implementation - which would have been intractable via a hardware description language. With these implementations, we further consider the benefit and necessity of four HLS-enabled optimizations, both in isolation and in concert - totaling seven distinct synthesized hardware pipelines. Leveraging real-world graphs of up to 516 million edges, we show empirically-measured speedups of up to 9.5 x over the initial HLS implementations when all optimizations work in concert.