Computing connected components on parallel computers

  • Authors:
  • D. S. Hirschberg;A. K. Chandra;D. V. Sarwate

  • Affiliations:
  • Rice Univ., Houston, TX;IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY;Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1979

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Abstract

We present a parallel algorithm which uses n2 processors to find the connected components of an undirected graph with n vertices in time O(log2n). An O(log2n) time bound also can be achieved using only n⌈n/⌈log2n⌉⌉ processors. The algorithm can be used to find the transitive closure of a symmetric Boolean matrix. We assume that the processors have access to a common memory. Simultaneous access to the same location is permitted for fetch instructions but not for store instructions.