Parallel Five-cycle Counting Algorithms

Counting the frequency of subgraphs in large networks is a classic research question that reveals the underlying substructures of these networks for important applications. However, subgraph counting is a challenging problem, even for subgraph sizes as small as five, due to the combinatorial explosion in the number of possible occurrences. This article focuses on the five-cycle, which is an important special case of five-vertex subgraph counting and one of the most difficult to count efficiently. We design two new parallel five-cycle counting algorithms and prove that they are work efficient and achieve polylogarithmic span. Both algorithms are based on computing low out-degree orientations, which enables the efficient computation of directed two-paths and three-paths, and the algorithms differ in the ways in which they use this orientation to eliminate double-counting. Additionally, we present new parallel algorithms for obtaining unbiased estimates of five-cycle counts using graph sparsification. We develop fast multicore implementations of the algorithms and propose a work scheduling optimization to improve their performance. Our experiments on a variety of real-world graphs using a 36-core machine with two-way hyper-threading show that our best exact parallel algorithm achieves 10–46× self-relative speedup, outperforms our serial benchmarks by 10–32×, and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art serial algorithm by up to 818×. Our best approximate algorithm, for a reasonable probability parameter, achieves up to 20× self-relative speedup and is able to approximate five-cycle counts 9–189× faster than our best exact algorithm, with between 0.52% and 11.77% error.