Ordering heuristics for parallel graph coloring

This paper introduces the largest-log-degree-first (LLF) and smallest-log-degree-last (SLL) ordering heuristics for parallel greedy graph-coloring algorithms, which are inspired by the largest-degree-first (LF) and smallest-degree-last (SL) serial heuristics, respectively. We show that although LF and SL, in practice, generate colorings with relatively small numbers of colors, they are vulnerable to adversarial inputs for which any parallelization yields a poor parallel speedup. In contrast, LLF and SLL allow for provably good speedups on arbitrary inputs while, in practice, producing colorings of competitive quality to their serial analogs. We applied LLF and SLL to the parallel greedy coloring algorithm introduced by Jones and Plassmann, referred to here as JP. Jones and Plassman analyze the variant of JP that processes the vertices of a graph in a random order, and show that on an O(1)-degree graph G=(V,E), this JP-R variant has an expected parallel running time of O(lgV/lglgV) in a PRAM model. We improve this bound to show, using work-span analysis, that JP-R, augmented to handle arbitrary-degree graphs, colors a graph G=(V,E) with degree Delta using Theta(V+E) work and O(lgV+ lg Delta . min sqrt-E, Delta +lg DeltaVlglgV) expected span. We prove that JP-LLF and JP-SLL --- JP using the LLF and SLL heuristics, respectively --- execute with the same asymptotic work as JP-R and only logarithmically more span while producing higher-quality colorings than JP-R in practice. We engineered an efficient implementation of JP for modern shared-memory multicore computers and evaluated its performance on a machine with 12 Intel Core-i7 (Nehalem) processor cores. Our implementation of JP-LLF achieves a geometric-mean speedup of 7.83 on eight real-world graphs and a geometric-mean speedup of 8.08 on ten synthetic graphs, while our implementation using SLL achieves a geometric-mean speedup of 5.36 on these real-world graphs and a geometric-mean speedup of 7.02 on these synthetic graphs. Furthermore, on one processor, JP-LLF is slightly faster than a well-engineered serial greedy algorithm using LF, and likewise, JP-SLL is slightly faster than the greedy algorithm using SL.