Rapid Multipole Graph Drawing on the GPU

As graphics processors become powerful, ubiquitous and easier to program, they have also become more amenable to general purpose high-performance computing, including the computationally expensive task of drawing large graphs. This paper describes a new parallel analysis of the multipole method of graph drawing to support its efficient GPU implementation. We use a variation of the Fast Multipole Method to estimate the long distance repulsive forces in force directed layout. We support these multipole computations efficiently with a k-d tree constructed and traversed on the GPU. The algorithm achieves impressive speedup over previous CPU and GPU methods, drawing graphs with hundreds of thousands of vertices within a few seconds via CUDA on an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX.