The Case for the Graph 500

The Graph 500 is not new, but interest has recently been piqued as discussions are shifting to application development plans for exascale-class systems. To better prepare for unprecedented sizes of data sets, many in the community believe we need to change our views on performance measurement from FLOPS to TEPS (Traversed Edges per Second.)

The Graph 500 has an impressive steering committee of more than 50 international HPC experts from academia, industry and many of the national laboratories. According to the Graph 500 website, they are in the process of developing comprehensive benchmarks to address three application kernels: concurrent search, optimization (single source shortest path), and edge-oriented (maximal independent set), while attempting to focus on five graph-related business areas: Cybersecurity, Medical Informatics, Data Enrichment, Social Networks, and Symbolic Networks.