Recently, a number of researchers have investigated 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 [Bui and Jones, Proc.

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this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly describes the various ideas and algorithms implemented in METIS. Section 3 describes the user interface to the METIS graph partitioning and sparse matrix ordering packages. Sections 4 and 5 describe the formats of the input and output files used by METIS. Section 6 describes the stand-alone library that implements the various algorithms implemented in METIS. Section 7 describes the system requirements for the METIS package. Appendix A describes and compares various graph partitioning algorithms that are extensively used.

The scalability of a parallel algorithm on a parallel architecture is a measure of its capacity to effectively utilize an increasing number of processors. Scalability analysis may be used to select the best algorithm-architecture combination for a problem under different constraints on the growth of the problem size and the number of processors. It may be used to predict the performance of a parallel algorithm and a parallel architecture for a large number of processors from the known performance on fewer processors. For a fixed problem size, it may be used to determine the optimal number of processors to be used and the maximum possible speedup that can be obtained. The objective of this paper is to critically assess the state of the art in the theory of scalability analysis, and motivate further research on the development of new and more comprehensive analytical tools to study the scalability of parallel algorithms and architectures. We survey a number of techniques and formalisms t...

Recently, a number of researchers have investigated a class of algorithms that are based on multilevel graph partitioning that have moderate computational complexity, and provide excellent graph partitions. However, there exists little theoretical analysis that could explain the ability of multilevel algorithms to produce good partitions. In this paper we present such an analysis. We show under certain reasonable assumptions that even if no refinement is used in the uncoarsening phase, a good bisection of the coarser graph is worse than a good bisection of the finer graph by at most a small factor. We also show that the size of a good vertex-separator of the coarse graph projected to the finer graph (without performing refinement in the uncoarsening phase) is higher than the size of a good vertexseparator of the finer graph by at most a small factor.

We present the main algorithmic features in the software package SuperLU DIST, a distributedmemory sparse direct solver for large sets of linear equations. We give in detail our parallelization strategies, with a focus on scalability issues, and demonstrate the software’s parallel performance and scalability on current machines. The solver is based on sparse Gaussian elimination, with an innovative static pivoting strategy proposed earlier by the authors. The main advantage of static pivoting over classical partial pivoting is that it permits a priori determination of data structures and communication patterns, which lets us exploit techniques used in parallel sparse Cholesky algorithms to better parallelize both LU decomposition and triangular solution on large-scale distributed machines.

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Graph partitioning is a fundamental problem in several scientific and engineering applications. In this paper, we describe heuristics that improve the state-of-the-art practical algorithms used in graph-partitioning software in terms of both partitioning speed and quality. An important use of graph-partitioning is in ordering sparse matrices for obtaining direct solutions to sparse systems of linear equations arising in engineering and optimization applications. The experiments reported in this paper show that the use of these heuristics results in a considerable improvement in the quality of sparse-matrix orderings over conventional ordering methods, especially for sparse matrices arising in linear programming problems. In addition, our graph-partitioning-based ordering algorithm is more parallelizable than minimum-degree-based ordering algorithms, and it renders the ordered matrix more amenable to parallel factorization.