An Experimental Study of A Parallel Shortest Path Algorithm for Solving Large-Scale Graph Instances

Abstract

We present an experimental study of the single source shortest path problem with non-negative edge weights (NSSP) on large-scale graphs using the Δ-stepping parallel algorithm. We report performance results on the Cray MTA-2, a multithreaded parallel computer. The MTA-2 is a high-end shared memory system offering two unique features that aid the efficient parallel implementation of irregular algorithms: the ability to exploit fine-grained parallelism, and low-overhead synchronization primitives. Our implementation exhibits remarkable parallel speedup when compared with competitive sequential algorithms, for low-diameter sparse graphs. For instance, Δ-stepping on a directed scale-free graph of 100 million vertices and 1 billion edges takes less than ten seconds on 40 processors of the MTA-2, with a relative speedup of close to 30. To our knowledge, these are the first performance results of a shortest path problem on realistic graph instances in the order of billions of vertices and edges.

Publication
Proceedings of the Nine Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments, ALENEX 2007, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, January 6, 2007