Considerations for a Distributed GraphBLAS API

Benjamin Brock, Aydin Buluç, Timothy G. Mattson, Scott McMillan, José E. Moreira, Roger Pearce, Oguz Selvitopi, Trevor Steil

Abstract: The GraphBLAS emerged from an international effort to standardize linear-algebraic building blocks for computing on graphs and graph-structured data. The GraphBLAS is expressed as a C API and has paved the way for multiple implementations. The GraphBLAS C API, however, does not define how distributed-memory parallelism should be handled. This paper reviews various approaches for a GraphBLAS API for distributed computing. This work is guided by our experience with existing distributed memory libraries. Our goal for this paper is to highlight the pros and cons of different approaches rather than to advocate for one particular choice.