On the Parallelization of a Search for Counterexamples to a Conjecture of Erd\H{o}s

Abstract

<p>Denote by $k_t(G)$ the number of cliques of order $t$ in a graph $G$ having $n$ vertices. Let $k_t(n) = \min\{k_t(G)+k_t(\overline{G}) \}$ where $\overline{G}$ denotes the complement of $G$. Let $c_t(n) = {k_t(n)}/{\tbinom{n}{t}}$ and $c_t$ be the limit of $c_t(n)$ for $n$ going to infinity. A 1962 conjecture of Erd\H{o}s stating that $c_t = 2^{1-\tbinom{t}{2}}$ was disproved by Thomason in 1989 for all $t\geq 4$. Tighter counterexamples have been constructed by Jagger, {\v S}{\v t}ov{\' \i}{\v c}ek and Thomason in 1996, by Thomason for $t\leq 6$ in 1997, and by Franek for $t=6$ in 2002. Further tightenings $t=6,7$ and $8$ was recently obtained by Deza, Franek, and Liu.</p> <p>We investigate the computational framework used by Deza, Franek, and Liu. In particular, we present the benefits and limitations of different parallel computer memory architectures and parallel programming models. We propose a functional decomposition approach which is implemented in C++ with POSIX thread (Pthread) libraries for multi-threading. Computational benchmarking on the parallelized framework and a performance analysis including a comparison with the original computational framework are presented.</p>