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Title: A parallel graph coloring heuristic

Journal Article · · SIAM Journal on Scientific and Statistical Computing (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics); (United States)
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1137/0914041· OSTI ID:6492390
;  [1]
  1. Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)

The problem of computing good graph colorings arises in many diverse applications, such as in the estimation of sparse Jacobians and in the development of efficient, parallel iterative methods for solving sparse linear systems. This paper presents an asynchronous graph coloring heuristic well suited to distributed memory parallel computers. Experimental results obtained on an Intel iPSC/860 are presented, which demonstrate that, for graphs arising from finite element applications, the heuristic exhibits scalable performance and generates colorings usually within three or four colors of the best-known linear time sequential heuristics. For bounded degree graphs, it is shown that the expected running time of the heuristic under the P-Ram computation model is bounded by EO(log(n)/log log(n)). This bound is an improvement over the previously known best upper bound for the expected running time of a random heuristic for the graph coloring problem.

DOE Contract Number:
W-31109-ENG-38
OSTI ID:
6492390
Journal Information:
SIAM Journal on Scientific and Statistical Computing (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics); (United States), Vol. 14:3; ISSN 0196-5204
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English