Parallel Algorithms for Butterfly Computations

Abstract: Butterflies are the smallest non-trivial subgraph in bipartite graphs, and therefore having efficient computations for analyzing them is crucial to improving the quality of certain applications on bipartite graphs. In this paper, we design a framework called ParButterfly that contains new parallel algorithms for the following problems on processing butterflies: global counting, per-vertex counting, per-edge counting, tip decomposition (vertex peeling), and wing decomposition (edge peeling). The main component of these algorithms is aggregating wedges incident on subsets of vertices, and our framework supports different methods for wedge aggregation, including sorting, hashing, histogramming, and batching. In addition, ParButterfly supports different ways of ranking the vertices to speed up counting, including side ordering, approximate and exact degree ordering, and approximate and exact complement coreness ordering. For counting, ParButterfly also supports both exact computation as well as approximate computation via graph sparsification. We prove strong theoretical guarantees on the work and span of the algorithms in ParButterfly. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of all of the algorithms in ParButterfly on a collection of real-world bipartite graphs using a 48-core machine. Our counting algorithms obtain significant parallel speedup, outperforming the fastest sequential algorithms by up to 13.6x with a self-relative speedup of up to 38.5x. Compared to general subgraph counting solutions, we are orders of magnitude faster. Our peeling algorithms achieve self-relative speedups of up to 10.7x and outperform the fastest sequential baseline by up to several orders of magnitude.