Design and Implementation of GPU-Based Prim's Algorithm

Minimum spanning tree is a classical problem in graph theory that plays a key role in a broad domain of applications. This paper proposes a minimum spanning tree algorithm using Prim's approach on Nvidia GPU under CUDA architecture. By using new developed GPU-based Min-Reduction data parallel primitive in the key step of the algorithm, higher efficiency is achieved. Experimental results show that we obtain about 2 times speedup on Nvidia GTX260 GPU over the CPU implementation and 3 times speedup over non-primitives GPU implementation.