Multilevel Graph Partitioning Schemes

– In this paper we present experiments with a class of graph partitioning algorithms that reduce the size of the graph by collapsing vertices and edges, partition the smaller graph, and then uncoarsen it to construct a partition for the original graph. We investigate the effectiveness of many different choices for all three phases: coarsening, partition of the coarsest graph, and refinement. In particular, we present a new coarsening heuristic (called heavy-edge heuristic) for which the size of the partition of the coarse graph is within a small factor of the size of the final partition obtained after multilevel refinement. We also present a new scheme for refining during uncoarsening that is much faster than the Kernighan-Lin refinement. We test our scheme on a large number of graphs arising in various domains including finite element methods, linear programming, VLSI, and transportation. Our experiments show that our scheme consistently produces partitions that are better tha...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: George Karypis, Vipin Kumar
• Keywords: Coarsest Graph, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Graph Partitioning Algorithms, ICPP 1995, Smaller Graph