C++ and Interoperability between Libraries: The GraphBLAS C++ Specification

Abstract

Interoperability between libraries is often hindered by incompatible data formats, which can necessitate creating new copies of data when transferring data back and forth between different libraries. This additional data movement incurs additional runtime costs, particularly for sparse applications, where the costs of data movement often dwarf compute costs. In this paper, we investigate interoperability in the context of the C++ GraphBLAS Specification, where C++ concepts allow GraphBLAS algorithms to accept any matrix type as long as it follows the matrix interface defined in the GraphBLAS matrix concept. We first develop non-owning, lazily evaluated adapted views for a number of external data structures, including two categories of graphs defined in the Northwest Graph Library (NWGraph) and traditional pointer-based CSR data structures. These adapted views fulfill the C++ GraphBLAS matrix concept, allowing them to be used inside GraphBLAS algorithms. We then evaluate the performance of these adapted views across two kernels, matrix reduction and sparse times dense matrix multiplication (SpMM), where the performance achieved using a single generic implementation with these views largely matches the performance achieved operating directly on the original data structures, with a slight performance loss in one case. We then propose a mechanism for automatically discovering the availability of these views, allowing algorithms to directly accept external data structures. We also discuss potential extensions to the C++ GraphBLAS specification that might eliminate the small performance dip observed for one of the views.