Connected Components at Scale via Local Contractions

As a fundamental tool in hierarchical graph clustering, computing connected components has been a central problem in large-scale data mining. While many known algorithms have been developed for this problem, they are either not scalable in practice or lack strong theoretical guarantees on the parallel running time, that is, the number of communication rounds. So far, the best proven guarantee is $\Oh(\log n)$, which matches the running time in the PRAM model. In this paper, we aim to design a distributed algorithm for this problem that works well in theory and practice. In particular, we present a simple algorithm based on contractions and provide a scalable implementation of it in MapReduce. On the theoretical side, in addition to showing $\Oh(\log n)$ convergence for all graphs, we prove an $\Oh(\log \log n)$ parallel running time with high probability for a certain class of random graphs. We work in the MPC model that captures popular parallel computing frameworks, such as MapReduce, Hadoop or Spark. On the practical side, we show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art MapReduce algorithms. To confirm its scalability, we report empirical results on graphs with several trillions of edges.