Vectorising k-Core Decomposition for GPU Acceleration.

k-Core decomposition is a well-studied community detection problem in graph analytics in which each k-core of vertices induces a subgraph where all vertices have degree at least k. The decomposition is expensive to compute on large graphs and efforts to apply massive parallelism have had limited success. This paper presents a vectorisation of the problem that reframes it as a composition of vector primitives on flat, 1d arrays. With such a formulation, we can deploy highly optimised Deep Learning GPU and SIMD frameworks. On a moderate GPU, using PyTorch, we obtain up to 8 × improvement over the best parallel state-of-the-art implemented in C++ and running on an expensive 32-core machine. More importantly, our approach represents a novel abstraction showing that redesigning graph operations as a series of vectorised primitives makes highly-parallel analytics both easier and more accessible for developers. We posit that such an approach can vastly accelerate the use of cheap GPU hardware in complex graph analytics.