  We develop a novel parallel decomposition strategy for unweighted, undirected
graphs, based on growing disjoint connected clusters from batches of centers
progressively selected from yet uncovered nodes. With respect to similar
previous decompositions, our strategy exercises a tighter control on both the
number of clusters and their maximum radius.
  We present two important applications of our parallel graph decomposition:
(1) $k$-center clustering approximation; and (2) diameter approximation. In
both cases, we obtain algorithms which feature a polylogarithmic approximation
factor and are amenable to a distributed implementation that is geared for
massive (long-diameter) graphs. The total space needed for the computation is
linear in the problem size, and the parallel depth is substantially sublinear
in the diameter for graphs with low doubling dimension. To the best of our
knowledge, ours are the first parallel approximations for these problems which
achieve sub-diameter parallel time, for a relevant class of graphs, using only
linear space. Besides the theoretical guarantees, our algorithms allow for a
very simple implementation on clustered architectures: we report on extensive
experiments which demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency on large
graphs as compared to alternative known approaches.
