HyperBlocker: Accelerating Rule-based Blocking in Entity Resolution using GPUs

This paper studies rule-based blocking in Entity Resolution (ER). We propose Hyper Blocker, a GPU-accelerated system for blocking in ER. As opposed to previous blocking algorithms and parallel blocking solvers, Hyper Blocker employs a pipelined architecture to overlap data transfer and GPU operations. It generates a data-aware and rule-aware execution plan on CPUs, for specifying how rules are evaluated, and develops a number of hardware-aware optimizations to achieve massive parallelism on GPUs. Using real-life datasets, we show that Hyper Blocker is at least 6.8× and 9.1× faster than prior CPU-powered distributed systems and GPU-based ER solvers, respectively. Better still, by combining Hyper Blocker with the state-of-the-art ER matcher, we can speed up the overall ER process by at least 30% with comparable accuracy.