Parallel Overlapping Community Detection with SLPA

Social networks consist of various communities that host members sharing common characteristics. Often some members of one community are also members of other communities. Such shared membership of different communities leads to overlapping communities. Detecting such overlapping communities is a challenging and computationally intensive problem. In this paper, we investigate the usability of high performance computing in the area of social networks and community detection. We present highly scalable variants of a community detection algorithm called Speaker-listener Label Propagation Algorithm (SLPA). We show that despite of irregular data dependencies in the computation, parallel computing paradigms can significantly speed up the detection of overlapping communities of social networks which is computationally expensive. We show by experiments, how various parallel computing architectures can be utilized to analyze large social network data on both shared memory machines and distributed memory machines, such as IBM Blue Gene.