A Distributed Parallel Algorithm for Minimum Spanning Tree Problem

Abstract: In this paper we present and evaluate a parallel algorithm for solving a minimum spanning tree (MST) problem for supercomputers with distributed memory. The algorithm relies on the relaxation of the message processing order requirement for one specific message type compared to the original GHS (Gallager, Humblet, Spira) algorithm. Our algorithm adopts hashing and message compression optimization techniques as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel implementation of the GHS algorithm that linearly scales to more than 32 nodes (256 cores) of Infiniband cluster.