Improving the Speed and Quality of Parallel Graph Coloring

Abstract

Graph coloring assigns a color to each vertex of a graph such that no two adjacent vertices get the same color. It is a key building block in many applications. In practice, solutions that require fewer distinct colors and that can be computed faster are typically preferred. Various coloring heuristics exist that provide different quality versus speed tradeoffs. The highest-quality heuristics tend to be slow. To improve performance, several parallel implementations have been proposed. This paper describes two improvements of the widely used LDF heuristic. First, we present a “shortcutting” approach to increase the parallelism by non-speculatively breaking data dependencies. Second, we present “color reduction” techniques to boost the solution of LDF. On 18 graphs from various domains, the shortcutting approach yields 2.5 times more parallelism in the mean, and the color-reduction techniques improve the result quality by up to 20%. Our deterministic CUDA implementation running on a Titan V is 2.9 times faster in the mean and uses as few or fewer colors as the best GPU codes from the literature.