  The most efficient algorithms for finding maximum independent sets in both
theory and practice use reduction rules to obtain a much smaller problem
instance called a kernel. The kernel can then be solved quickly using exact or
heuristic algorithms---or by repeatedly kernelizing recursively in the
branch-and-reduce paradigm. It is of critical importance for these algorithms
that kernelization is fast and returns a small kernel. Current algorithms are
either slow but produce a small kernel, or fast and give a large kernel. We
attempt to accomplish both of these goals simultaneously, by giving an
efficient parallel kernelization algorithm based on graph partitioning and
parallel bipartite maximum matching. We combine our parallelization techniques
with two techniques to accelerate kernelization further: dependency checking
that prunes reductions that cannot be applied, and reduction tracking that
allows us to stop kernelization when reductions become less fruitful. Our
algorithm produces kernels that are orders of magnitude smaller than the
fastest kernelization methods, while having a similar execution time.
Furthermore, our algorithm is able to compute kernels with size comparable to
the smallest known kernels, but up to two orders of magnitude faster than
previously possible. Finally, we show that our kernelization algorithm can be
used to accelerate existing state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms, allowing us
to find larger independent sets faster on large real-world networks and
synthetic instances.
