Designing Efficient Parallel Algorithms for Graph Problems

Graph algorithms are concerned with the algorithmic aspects of solving graph problems. The problems are motivated from and have application to diverse areas of computer science, engineering and other disciplines. Problems arising from these areas of application are good candidates for parallelization since they often have both intense computational needs and stringent response time requirements. Motivated by these concerns, this thesis investigates parallel algorithms for these kinds of graph problems that have at least one of the following properties: the problems involve some type of dynamic updates; the sparsification technique is applicable; or the problems are closely related to communications network issues. The models of parallel computation used in our studies are the Parallel Random Access Machine (PRAM) model and the practical interconnection network models such as meshes and hypercubes. ¶ ..

Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable

There has been significant recent interest in parallel graph processing due to the need to quickly analyze the large graphs available today. Many graph codes have been designed for distributed memory or external memory. However, today even the largest publicly-available real-world graph (the Hyperlink Web graph with over 3.5 billion vertices and 128 billion edges) can fit in the memory of a single commodity multicore server. Nevertheless, most experimental work in the literature report results on much smaller graphs, and the ones for the Hyperlink graph use distributed or external memory. Therefore, it is natural to ask whether we can efficiently solve a broad class of graph problems on this graph in memory. This paper shows that theoretically-efficient parallel graph algorithms can scale to the largest publicly-available graphs using a single machine with a terabyte of RAM, processing them in minutes. We give implementations of theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for 20 important graph problems. We also present the optimizations and techniques that we used in our implementations, which were crucial in enabling us to process these large graphs quickly. We show that the running times of our implementations outperform existing state-of-the-art implementations on the largest real-world graphs. For many of the problems that we consider, this is the first time they have been solved on graphs at this scale. We have made the implementations developed in this work publicly-available as the Graph-Based Benchmark Suite (GBBS).Comment: This is the full version of the paper appearing in the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 201

Non-Local Probes Do Not Help with Graph Problems

This work bridges the gap between distributed and centralised models of computing in the context of sublinear-time graph algorithms. A priori, typical centralised models of computing (e.g., parallel decision trees or centralised local algorithms) seem to be much more powerful than distributed message-passing algorithms: centralised algorithms can directly probe any part of the input, while in distributed algorithms nodes can only communicate with their immediate neighbours. We show that for a large class of graph problems, this extra freedom does not help centralised algorithms at all: for example, efficient stateless deterministic centralised local algorithms can be simulated with efficient distributed message-passing algorithms. In particular, this enables us to transfer existing lower bound results from distributed algorithms to centralised local algorithms

Efficient parallel algorithms for a class of graph theoretic problems

The authors present efficient parallel algorithms for the following graph problems: finding the lowest common ancestors for vertex pairs of a directed tree; finding all fundamental cycles, a directed spanning forest, all bridges, all bridge-connected components, all separation vertices, all biconnected components, and testing the biconnectivity of an undirected graph. All these algorithms achieve the O(lg**2n) time bound.published_or_final_versio

Parallel Algorithms For Graph Problems

In this thesis we examine three problems in graph theory and propose efficient parallel algorithms for solving them. We also introduce a number of parallel algorithmic techniques

The parallel solution of domination problems on chordal and strongly chordal graphs

AbstractWe present efficient parallel algorithms for the domination problem on strongly chordal graphs and related problems, such as the set cover problem for α-acyclic hypergraphs and the dominating clique problem for strongly chordal graphs. Moreover, we present an efficient parallel algorithm which checks, for any chordal graph, whether it has a dominating clique

Some Optimally Adaptive Parallel Graph Algorithms on EREW PRAM Model

The study of graph algorithms is an important area of research in computer science, since graphs offer useful tools to model many real-world situations. The commercial availability of parallel computers have led to the development of efficient parallel graph algorithms. Using an exclusive-read and exclusive-write (EREW) parallel random access machine (PRAM) as the computation model with a fixed number of processors, we design and analyze parallel algorithms for seven undirected graph problems, such as, connected components, spanning forest, fundamental cycle set, bridges, bipartiteness, assignment problems, and approximate vertex coloring. For all but the last two problems, the input data structure is an unordered list of edges, and divide-and-conquer is the paradigm for designing algorithms. One of the algorithms to solve the assignment problem makes use of an appropriate variant of dynamic programming strategy. An elegant data structure, called the adjacency list matrix, used in a vertex-coloring algorithm avoids the sequential nature of linked adjacency lists. Each of the proposed algorithms achieves optimal speedup, choosing an optimal granularity (thus exploiting maximum parallelism) which depends on the density or the number of vertices of the given graph. The processor-(time)2 product has been identified as a useful parameter to measure the cost-effectiveness of a parallel algorithm. We derive a lower bound on this measure for each of our algorithms