Theoretically and Practically Efficient Parallel Nucleus Decomposition

This paper studies the nucleus decomposition problem, which has been shown to be useful in finding dense substructures in graphs. We present a novel parallel algorithm that is efficient both in theory and in practice. Our algorithm achieves a work complexity matching the best sequential algorithm while also having low depth (parallel running time), which significantly improves upon the only existing parallel nucleus decomposition algorithm (Sariyuce et al., PVLDB 2018). The key to the theoretical efficiency of our algorithm is a new lemma that bounds the amount of work done when peeling cliques from the graph, combined with the use of a theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for clique listing and bucketing. We introduce several new practical optimizations, including a new multi-level hash table structure to store information on cliques space-efficiently and a technique for traversing this structure cache-efficiently. On a 30-core machine with two-way hyper-threading on real-world graphs, we achieve up to a 55x speedup over the state-of-the-art parallel nucleus decomposition algorithm by Sariyuce et al., and up to a 40x self-relative parallel speedup. We are able to efficiently compute larger nucleus decompositions than prior work on several million-scale graphs for the first time.