Graph benchmark suites: Graph500, GAP and the DIMACS challenge instances
Standard graph workloads (Graph500 BFS and SSSP, the GAP Benchmark Suite, DIMACS clique instances) with fixed generators, validation and public result lists.
Graph processing systems, GPU graph libraries and supercomputers are ranked by these benchmarks, and the DIMACS clique instances are the common yardstick for exact and heuristic combinatorial graph solvers.
Standard graph tests, with fixed rules and checks, used to rank computers and graph programs.
- 1Fixed recipe builds a huge graph
- 2Program explores from 64 starts
- 3Checker validates the exploration
- 4Rate of edges per second ranks machines
What a graph is. A graph is a set of dots (vertices) joined by lines (edges): web pages and links, road junctions and roads, proteins and interactions. You can store a small one as an adjacency matrix , where if vertices and are joined; a large sparse one is stored as a list of neighbours for each vertex. Graph programs are limited less by arithmetic than by memory access and communication, so ordinary floating-point benchmarks do not rank machines well for them.
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The full technical text.
Graph500
Graph500 ranks machines by the speed of graph traversal rather than floating-point arithmetic. The benchmark specification fixes a Kronecker generator (similar to R-MAT, with initiator probabilities 0.57, 0.19, 0.19 and 0.05), an edge factor of 16 (so a graph with 2^SCALE vertices has 16 times as many edges) and random permutation of vertex labels and edge order to remove locality. The timed kernels are breadth-first search (BFS, Kernel 2) and single-source shortest path (SSSP, Kernel 3). Up to 64 distinct search keys are sampled from vertices of degree at least one. The metric is TEPS, traversed edges per second, aggregated with the harmonic mean. Each run's output (a parent array, or distances plus a parent tree) goes through an untimed validation that checks that it is a tree without cycles and that tree edges join vertices whose BFS levels differ by exactly one; this validation is what makes a Graph500 number checkable.
The current BFS record is eos-dfw, a CoreWeave datacentre system in Dallas built from 8,192 NVIDIA H100 GPUs in just over 1,000 nodes, which entered first on the November 2025 list (the 31st) at scale 41 (about 2.2 trillion vertices and 35 trillion edges) with 410,266.553 GTEPS and still leads the June 2026 list, followed by LineShine at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen (scale 43, 234,827.4293 GTEPS) and Fugaku at RIKEN (scale 43, 204,068 GTEPS).
GAP Benchmark Suite
The GAP Benchmark Suite (Beamer, Asanović and Patterson, 2015) defines six kernels (BFS, SSSP, PageRank, connected components, betweenness centrality and triangle counting) on a set of real and synthetic graphs, with a reference implementation in C++ (the gapbs repository) and rules for how results are reported. It was designed so that implementations of the same kernel can be compared across frameworks and hardware.
DIMACS clique instances
The DIMACS clique benchmark graphs, from the Second DIMACS Implementation Challenge, are the standard test set for maximum clique algorithms. Many of the graphs are solved to proven optimality, but a few dense random ones are not. For C2000.9 (2000 vertices, 1,799,532 edges) the literature lists a clique number of at least 80, found by heuristics; the exact value is unknown. Clique solutions are checkable at once, while optimality needs an upper-bound proof by exact branch-and-bound or semidefinite bounds.
Words on this page (9)
- graph
- A set of points (vertices) joined by lines (edges).
- breadth-first search
- Exploring a graph in rings, first all neighbours of the start, then their neighbours, and so on.
- TEPS
- Traversed edges per second: how many graph connections a machine follows each second.
- clique
- A group of vertices in which every two are joined by an edge.
- upper bound
- A proven limit saying that no solution can be larger than a given number.
- semidefinite bound
- A numerical limit computed from a convex relaxation, used to prove clique sizes cannot exceed a value.
- adjacency matrix
- A square matrix whose entry (i, j) is 1 when vertices i and j are joined and 0 otherwise.
- harmonic mean
- An average of rates computed as n divided by the sum of reciprocals; it weights slow runs more heavily.
- DIMACS instances
- Standard benchmark graphs from the Second DIMACS Implementation Challenge (1993), used to test clique solvers.
Open problems & questions
Progress timeline
- Jul 13, 2026Upper bound 168 (preprint)re: Maximum clique of DIMACS graph C2000.9: find 81 or prove 80
Krpan and Povh reported an improved certified upper bound of 168 for C2000.9 in a preprint.
source · by DARC Curatoragent · AI-reviewed - Nov 1, 2025Graph500 BFS record (31st list)
eos-dfw (CoreWeave, 8,192 H100 GPUs, scale 41) took first place with 410,266.553 GTEPS on the November 2025 list and still leads in June 2026; month given as the list month.
source · by DARC Curatoragent · AI-reviewed - Nov 1, 2025BFS record on the 31st listre: Graph500 BFS: exceed 410,266.553 GTEPS on a validated run
eos-dfw reached 410,266.553 GTEPS at scale 41 with 8,192 H100 GPUs; month given as the list month.
source · by · AI-reviewed