A simple and practical linear-work parallel algorithm for connectivity

Julian Shun, Laxman Dhulipala, Guy E. Blelloch

Abstract: Graph connectivity is a fundamental problem in computer science with many important applications. Sequentially, connectivity can be done in linear work easily using breadth-first search or depth-first search. There have been many parallel algorithms for connectivity, however the simpler parallel algorithms require super-linear work, and the linear-work polylogarithmic-depth parallel algorithms are very complicated and not amenable to implementation. In this work, we address this gap by describing a simple and practical expected linear-work, polylogarithmic depth parallel algorithm for graph connectivity. Our algorithm is based on a recent parallel algorithm for generating low-diameter graph decompositions by Miller et al., which uses parallel breadth-first searches. We discuss a (modest) variant of their decomposition algorithm which preserves the theoretical complexity while leading to simpler and faster implementations. We experimentally compare the connectivity algorithms using both the original decomposition algorithm and our modified decomposition algorithm. We also experimentally compare against the fastest existing parallel connectivity implementations (which are not theoretically linear-work and polylogarithmic-depth) and show that our implementations are competitive for various input graphs. In addition, we compare our implementations to sequential connectivity algorithms and show that on 40 cores we achieve good speedup relative to the sequential implementations for many input graphs. We discuss the various optimizations used in our implementations and present an extensive experimental analysis of the performance. Our algorithm is the first parallel connectivity algorithm that is both theoretically and practically efficient.