Fast parallel algorithm for unfolding of communities in large graphs

Detecting community structures in graphs is a well studied problem in graph data analytics. Unprecedented growth in graph structured data due to the development of the world wide web and social networks in the past decade emphasizes the need for fast graph data analytics techniques. In this paper we present a simple yet efficient approach to detect communities in large scale graphs by modifying the sequential Louvain algorithm for community detection. The proposed distributed memory parallel algorithm targets the costly first iteration of the initial method by parallelizing it. Experimental results on a MPI setup with 128 parallel processes shows that up to ≈5× performance improvement is achieved as compared to the sequential version while not compromising the correctness of the final result.