Performance and accuracy predictions of approximation methods for shortest-path algorithms on GPUs

Abstract

Approximate computing techniques, where less-than-perfect solutions are acceptable, present performance-accuracy trade-offs by performing inexact computations. Moreover, heterogeneous architectures, a combination of miscellaneous compute units, offer high performance as well as energy efficiency. Graph algorithms utilize the parallel computation units of heterogeneous GPU architectures as well as performance improvements offered by approximation methods. Since different approximations yield different speedup and accuracy loss for the target execution, it becomes impractical to test all methods with various parameters. In this work, we perform approximate computations for the three shortest-path graph algorithms and propose a machine learning framework to predict the impact of the approximations on program performance and output accuracy. We evaluate random predictions for both synthetic and real road-network graphs, and predictions of the large graph cases from small graph instances. We achieve less than 5% prediction error rates for speedup and inaccuracy values.