\texttt{Picasso}: Memory-Efficient Graph Coloring Using Palettes With Applications in Quantum Computing

A \emph{coloring} of a graph is an assignment of colors to vertices such that no two neighboring vertices have the same color. The need for memory-efficient coloring algorithms is motivated by their application in computing clique partitions of graphs arising in quantum computations where the objective is to map a large set of Pauli strings into a compact set of unitaries. We present \texttt{Picasso}, a randomized memory-efficient iterative parallel graph coloring algorithm with theoretical sublinear space guarantees under practical assumptions. The parameters of our algorithm provide a trade-off between coloring quality and resource consumption. To assist the user, we also propose a machine learning model to predict the coloring algorithm's parameters considering these trade-offs. We provide a sequential and a parallel implementation of the proposed algorithm. We perform an experimental evaluation on a 64-core AMD CPU equipped with 512 GB of memory and an Nvidia A100 GPU with 40GB of memory. For a small dataset where existing coloring algorithms can be executed within the 512 GB memory budget, we show up to {\bf 68$\times$} memory savings. On massive datasets we demonstrate that GPU-accelerated \pic{} can process inputs with {\bf 49.5$\times$} more Pauli strings (vertex set in our graph) and {\bf 2,478$\times$} more edges than state-of-the-art parallel approaches.