An efficient MapReduce algorithm for counting triangles in a very large graph

Triangle counting problem is one of the fundamental problem in various domains. The problem can be utilized for computation of clustering coefficient, transitivity, trianglular connectivity, trusses, etc. The problem have been extensively studied in internal memory but the algorithms are not scalable for enormous graphs. In recent years, the MapReduce has emerged as a de facto standard framework for processing large data through parallel computing. A MapReduce algorithm was proposed for the problem based on graph partitioning. However, the algorithm redundantly generates a large number of intermediate data that cause network overload and prolong the processing time. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based on graph partitioning with a novel idea of triangle classification to count the number of triangles in a graph. The algorithm substantially reduces the duplication by classifying triangles into three types and processing each triangle differently according to its type. In the experiments, we compare the proposed algorithm with recent existing algorithms using both synthetic datasets and real-world datasets that are composed of millions of nodes and billions of edges. The proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms in most cases. Especially, for a twitter dataset, the proposed algorithm is more than twice as fast as existing MapReduce algorithms. Moreover, the performance gap increases as the graph becomes larger and denser.