Parallel Algorithm for Dynamic Community Detection

Abstract

Many real systems can be naturally modeled by complex networks. A complex network represents an abstraction of the system regarding its components and their respective interactions. Thus, by scrutinizing the network, interesting properties of the system can be revealed. Among them, the presence of communities, which consists of groups of densely connected nodes, is a significant one. For instance, a community might reveal patterns, such as the functional units of the system, or even groups correlated people in social networks. Albeit important, the community detection process is not a simple computational task, in special when the network is dynamic. Thus, several researchers have addressed this problem providing distinct methods, especially to deal with static networks. Recently, a new algorithm was introduced to solve this problem. The approach consists of modeling the network as a set of particles inspired by a N-body problem. Besides delivering similar results to state-of-the-art community detection algorithm, the proposed model is dynamic in nature; thus, it can be straightforwardly applied to time-varying complex networks. However, the Particle Model still has a major drawback. Its computational cost is quadratic per cycle, which restricts its application to mid-scale networks. To overcome this limitation, here, we present a novel parallel algorithm using many-core high-performance resources. Through the implementation of a new data structure, named distance matrix, was allowed a massive parallelization of the particles interactions. Simulation results show that our parallel approach, running both traditional CPUs and hardware accelerators based on multicore CPUs and GPUs, can speed up the method permitting its application to large-scale networks.