This paper proposes efficient solutions for k -core decomposition with high parallelism. The problem of k -core decomposition is fundamental in graph analysis and has applications across various domains. However, existing algorithms face significant challenges in achieving work-efficiency in theory and/or high parallelism in practice, and suffer from various performance bottlenecks. We present a simple, work-efficient parallel framework for k -core decomposition that is easy to implement and adaptable to various strategies for improving work-efficiency. We introduce two techniques to enhance parallelism: a sampling scheme to reduce contention on high-degree vertices, and vertical granularity control (VGC) to mitigate scheduling overhead for low-degree vertices. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical bucket structure to optimize performance for graphs with high coreness values. We evaluate our algorithm on a diverse set of real-world and synthetic graphs. Compared to state-of-the-art parallel algorithms, including ParK, PKC, and Julienne, our approach demonstrates superior performance on 23 out of 25 graphs when tested on a 96-core machine. Our algorithm shows speedups of up to 315× over ParK, 33.4× over PKC, and 52.5× over Julienne.

Given two strings $A[1..n]$ and $B[1..m]$, and a set of operations allowed to edit the strings, the edit distance between $A$ and $B$ is the minimum number of operations required to transform $A$ into $B$. Sequentially, a standard Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm solves edit distance with $Θ(nm)$ cost. In many real-world applications, the strings to be compared are similar and have small edit distances. To achieve highly practical implementations, we focus on output-sensitive parallel edit-distance algorithms, i.e., to achieve asymptotically better cost bounds than the standard $Θ(nm)$ algorithm when the edit distance is small. We study four algorithms in the paper, including three algorithms based on Breadth-First Search (BFS) and one algorithm based on Divide-and-Conquer (DaC). Our BFS-based solution is based on the Landau-Vishkin algorithm. We implement three different data structures for the longest common prefix (LCP) queries needed in the algorithm: the classic solution using parallel suffix array, and two hash-based solutions proposed in this paper. Our DaC-based solution is inspired by the output-insensitive solution proposed by Apostolico et al., and we propose a non-trivial adaption to make it output-sensitive. All our algorithms have good theoretical guarantees, and they achieve different tradeoffs between work (total number of operations), span (longest dependence chain in the computation), and space. We test and compare our algorithms on both synthetic data and real-world data. Our BFS-based algorithms outperform the existing parallel edit-distance implementation in ParlayLib in all test cases. By comparing our algorithms, we also provide a better understanding of the choice of algorithms for different input patterns. We believe that our paper is the first systematic study in the theory and practice of parallel edit distance.