A Generic and Highly Efficient Parallel Variant of Boruvka's Algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents (i) a parallel, platform independent variant of Boruvka's algorithm, an efficient Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) solver, and (ii) a comprehensive comparison of MST-solver implementations, both on multi-core CPU-chips and GPUs. The core of our variant is an effective and explicit contraction of the graph. Our multi-core CPU implementation scales linearly up to 8 threads, whereas the GPU implementation performs considerably better than the optimal number of threads running on the CPU. We also show that our implementations outperform all other parallel MST-solver implementations in (ii), for a broad set of publicly available road network graphs.