ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (TOPC) | 2021
Parallel Minimum Cuts in Near-linear Work and Low Depth
Abstract
We present the first near-linear work and poly-logarithmic depth algorithm for computing a minimum cut in an undirected graph. Previous parallel algorithms with poly-logarithmic depth required at least quadratic work in the number of vertices. In a graph with n vertices and m edges, our randomized algorithm computes the minimum cut with high probability in O(m log4 n) work and O(log3 n) depth. This result is obtained by parallelizing a data structure that aggregates weights along paths in a tree, in addition exploiting the connection between minimum cuts and approximate maximum packings of spanning trees. In addition, our algorithm improves upon bounds on the number of cache misses incurred to compute a minimum cut.