Scalable parallel minimum spanning forest computation

  • Authors:
  • Sadegh Nobari;Thanh-Tung Cao;Panagiotis Karras;Stéphane Bressan

  • Affiliations:
  • National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore;Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA;National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The proliferation of data in graph form calls for the development of scalable graph algorithms that exploit parallel processing environments. One such problem is the computation of a graph's minimum spanning forest (MSF). Past research has proposed several parallel algorithms for this problem, yet none of them scales to large, high-density graphs. In this paper we propose a novel, scalable, parallel MSF algorithm for undirected weighted graphs. Our algorithm leverages Prim's algorithm in a parallel fashion, concurrently expanding several subsets of the computed MSF. Our effort focuses on minimizing the communication among different processors without constraining the local growth of a processor's computed subtree. In effect, we achieve a scalability that previous approaches lacked. We implement our algorithm in CUDA, running on a GPU and study its performance using real and synthetic, sparse as well as dense, structured and unstructured graph data. Our experimental study demonstrates that our algorithm outperforms the previous state-of-the-art GPU-based MSF algorithm, while being several orders of magnitude faster than sequential CPU-based algorithms.