Fast computing reachability labelings for large graphs with high compression rate

Abstract

There are numerous applications that need to deal with a large graph and need to query reachability between nodes in the graph. A 2-hop cover can compactly represent the whole edge transitive closure of a graph in O(|V|·|1/2) space, and be used to answer reachability query efficiently. However, it is challenging to compute a 2-hop cover. The existing approaches suffer from either large resource consumption or low compression rate. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical partitioning approach to partition a large graph G into two subgraphs repeatedly in a top-down fashion. The unique feature of our approach is that we compute 2-hop cover while partitioning. In brief, in every iteration of top-down partitioning, we provide techniques to compute the 2-hop cover for connections between the two subgraphs first. A cover is computed to cut the graph into two subgraphs, which results in an overall cover with high compression for the entire graph G. Two approaches are proposed, namely a node-oriented approach and an edge-oriented approach. Our approach can efficiently compute 2-hop cover for a large graph with high compression rate. Our extensive experiment studies show that the 2-hop cover for a graph with 1,700,000 nodes and 169 billion connections can be obtained in less than 30 minutes with a compression rate about 40,000 using a PC. Copyright 2008 ACM.