Parallel algorithms for switching edges in heterogeneous graphs

An edge switch is an operation on a graph (or network) where two edges are selected randomly and one of their end vertices is swapped with each other. Edge switch operations have important applications in graph theory and network analysis, such as in generating random networks with a given degree sequence, modeling and analyzing dynamic networks, and in studying various dynamic phenomena over a network. The recent growth of real-world networks motivates the need for efficient parallel algorithms. The dependencies among successive edge switch operations and the requirement to keep the graph simple (i.e., no self-loops or parallel edges) as the edges are switched lead to significant challenges in designing a parallel algorithm. Addressing these challenges requires complex synchronization and communication among the processors leading to difficulties in achieving a good speedup by parallelization. In this paper, we present distributed memory parallel algorithms for switching edges in massive networks. These algorithms provide good speedup and scale well to a large number of processors. A harmonic mean speedup of 73.25 is achieved on eight different networks with 1024 processors. One of the steps in our edge switch algorithms requires the computation of multinomial random variables in parallel. This paper presents the first non-trivial parallel algorithm for the problem, achieving a speedup of 925 using 1024 processors. •We present distributed memory parallel algorithms for switching edges in a network.•The algorithms are carefully designed to work efficiently with massive networks.•Our algorithms deal with complex synchronization and computation dependency issues.•We study several partitioning schemes in conjunction with the parallel algorithms.•We also present the first parallel algorithm for computing multinomial distribution.