Accelerating the Bron-Kerbosch Algorithm for Maximal Clique Enumeration Using GPUs

Abstract

Maximal clique enumeration (MCE) is a classic problem in graph theory to identify all complete subgraphs in a graph. In prior MCE work, the Bron-Kerbosch algorithm is one of the most popular solutions, and there are several improved algorithms proposed on CPU platforms. However, while few studies have focused on the related issue of parallel implementation, recently, there have been numerous explorations of the acceleration of general purpose applications using a graphics processing unit (GPU) to reduce the computing power consumption. In this article, we develop a GPU-based Bron-Kerbosch algorithm that efficiently solves the MCE problem in parallel by optimizing the process of subproblem decomposition and computing resource usage. To speed up the computations, we use coalesced memory accesses and warp reductions to increase bandwidth and reduce memory latency. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can fully exploit the resources of GPU architectures, allowing for the vast acceleration of operations to solve the MCE problem.