Medusa: A Parallel Graph Processing System on Graphics Processors

Medusa is a parallel graph processing system on graphics processors (GPUs). The core design of Medusa is to enable developers to leverage the massive parallelism and other hardware features of GPUs by writing sequential C/C++ code for a small set of APIs. This simplifies the implementation of parallel graph processing on the GPU. The runtime system of Medusa automatically executes the user-defined APIs in parallel on the GPU, with a series of optimizations based on the architecture features of GPUs and characteristics of graph applications. In this paper, we present an overview of the Medusa system and a case study of adopting Medusa to a research project on social network simulations. With Medusa, users without GPU programming experience can quickly implement their graph operations on the GPU, which accelerates the discovery and findings of domain-specific applications.