Ripples is a software framework to study the Influence Maximization problem. The problem of Influence Maximization was introduced in 2001 by Domingos and Richardson [DR01] and later formulated as an optimization problem under the framework of submodular functions by Kempe et al. [KTR03].

Given a graph G, a network diffusion model M, and positive integer k, the influence maximization problem is the problem of selecting a set of seeds S of cardinality k such that \mathop{\mathbb{E}}[I(S)] is maximized, where I(S) is the influence function.

Our goal with Ripples is to provide tools implementing fast and scalable state-of-the-art approximation algorithms to solve the influence maximization problem.

First of all we need to set up the Python environment needed.

$ python -m venv --prompt ripples-dev .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
$ pip install conan

Then, we set up the conan profile:

$ conan profile detect

You can check that the conan has detected the correct compiler by:

$ conan profile show

In many cases this will show the correct configuration. Notable exceptions are systems where you want to use a provided compiler wrapper (e.g., many HPE machines ship compiler wrappers) or you want to use hipcc to compile the framework. In that case you want to edit your conan profile file with:

$ vim $(conan profile path default)

Here as a reference you can find how to change the profile to use hipcc:

[settings]
arch=x86_64
build_type=Release
compiler=clang
compiler.cppstd=gnu14
compiler.libcxx=libstdc++11
compiler.version=15
os=Linux
[buildenv]
*:CC=hipcc
*:CXX=hipcc

The next step is to install dependencies:

$ conan create conan/trng
$ conan create conan/rocThrust # if compiling with AMD GPU support.
$ conan create conan/metall    # if compiling with Metall support.
$ conan install . --build missing
$ conan install . --build missing -o gpu=amd # for AMD GPU support.

We can now compile ripples:

$ conan build .               # CPU only version
$ conan build . -o gpu=amd    # with AMD GPU support.

To enable Memkind or Metall please replace the conan install command with one of:

Ripples + Metall has another mode that allocates intermediate data (called RRRSets) using Metall.

To enable the mode, define ENABLE_METALL_RRRSETS macro (e.g., insert #define ENABLE_METALL_RRRSETS at the beginning of tools/imm.cc).

The storage directory can be specified with --rr-store-dir=<PATH> argument when executing imm.

• Marco Mintutoli
• Mahantesh Halappanavar
• Ananth Kalyanaraman
• Maurizio Drocco
• Reece Neff

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