A linear algorithm for semi-external cutnode computation

Abstract

In the literature, many algorithms have been proposed for finding cutnodes on undirected graphs, since cutnodes are crucial to graph connectivity. Here, a cutnode of an undirected graph G is a node of G, whose deletion will cause a reachable pair of the other nodes in G to be unreachable. Currently, the difficulty of maintaining the entire G in the main memory makes researchers pay attention to compute cutnodes on semi-external memory model. This paper shows that traditional semi-external algorithms are limited by their unbounded time and I/O consumption, making them impractical when G is relatively large or complex. Thus, we propose a linear semi-external cutnode computation algorithm, named SECN. Assuming that G has n nodes and m edges, and B is the disk block size. SECN is the first that can find all the cutnodes of G in O(m+n) time and with O(mB) I/O cost on the semi-external memory model, as far as we know. SECN also has a smaller minimum memory space requirement than traditional algorithms. Our experimental evaluation conducted on both synthetic and real graphs confirms that SECN significantly outperforms existing algorithms (up to 103 times faster).