Parallel transitive closure computations using topological sort

Deals with parallel transitive closure computations. The sort-based approaches introduced sorts the tuples of the relation into topological order, and the sorted relation is then horizontally partitioned and distributed across several processing nodes of a message passing multiprocessor system. This data partitioning strategy allows the transitive closure computation of the local data fragments to be computed in parallel with no interprocessor communication. The construction of the final result then requires only a small number of joins. Extensive analytical results are included in the paper as well. They show that the proposed techniques leads to a speedup that is essentially linear with the number of processors. Its performance is significantly better than the recently published hashless parallel algorithm