This paper presents efficient distributed algorithms for a number of fundamental problems in the area of graph sparsification: • We provide the first deterministic distributed algorithm that computes an ultra-sparse spanner in polylog(n) rounds in weighted graphs. Concretely, our algorithm outputs a spanning subgraph with only n + o (n) edges in which the pairwise distances are stretched by a factor of at most O(logn · 2O(log* n)). • We provide a polylog(n)-round deterministic distributed algorithm that computes a spanner with stretch (2k - 1) and O(nk + n1+1/k log k) edges in unweighted graphs and with O(n1+1/k k) edges in weighted graphs. • We present the first polylog(n) round randomized distributed algorithm that computes a sparse conne...