Accelerating shape optimizing load balancing for parallel FEM simulations by algebraic multigrid

We propose a load balancing heuristic for parallel adaptive finite element method (FEM) simulations. In contrast to most existing approaches, the heuristic fo-cuses on good partition shapes rather than on mini-mizing the classical edge-cut metric. By applying Alge-braic Multigrid (AMG), we are able to speed up the two most time consuming calculations of the approach while maintaining its large amount of natural parallelism

Partitioning Complex Networks via Size-constrained Clustering

The most commonly used method to tackle the graph partitioning problem in practice is the multilevel approach. During a coarsening phase, a multilevel graph partitioning algorithm reduces the graph size by iteratively contracting nodes and edges until the graph is small enough to be partitioned by some other algorithm. A partition of the input graph is then constructed by successively transferring the solution to the next finer graph and applying a local search algorithm to improve the current solution. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to partition graphs effectively especially if the networks have a highly irregular structure. More precisely, our algorithm provides graph coarsening by iteratively contracting size-constrained clusterings that are computed using a label propagation algorithm. The same algorithm that provides the size-constrained clusterings can also be used during uncoarsening as a fast and simple local search algorithm. Depending on the algorithm's configuration, we are able to compute partitions of very high quality outperforming all competitors, or partitions that are comparable to the best competitor in terms of quality, hMetis, while being nearly an order of magnitude faster on average. The fastest configuration partitions the largest graph available to us with 3.3 billion edges using a single machine in about ten minutes while cutting less than half of the edges than the fastest competitor, kMetis

Parallel Graph Partitioning for Complex Networks

Processing large complex networks like social networks or web graphs has recently attracted considerable interest. In order to do this in parallel, we need to partition them into pieces of about equal size. Unfortunately, previous parallel graph partitioners originally developed for more regular mesh-like networks do not work well for these networks. This paper addresses this problem by parallelizing and adapting the label propagation technique originally developed for graph clustering. By introducing size constraints, label propagation becomes applicable for both the coarsening and the refinement phase of multilevel graph partitioning. We obtain very high quality by applying a highly parallel evolutionary algorithm to the coarsened graph. The resulting system is both more scalable and achieves higher quality than state-of-the-art systems like ParMetis or PT-Scotch. For large complex networks the performance differences are very big. For example, our algorithm can partition a web graph with 3.3 billion edges in less than sixteen seconds using 512 cores of a high performance cluster while producing a high quality partition -- none of the competing systems can handle this graph on our system.Comment: Review article. Parallelization of our previous approach arXiv:1402.328

Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning

We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph partitioning together with applications and future research directions

Accelerating Shape Optimizing Load Balancing for Parallel FEM Simulations by Algebraic Multigrid

We propose a load balancing heuristic for parallel adaptive finite element method (FEM) simulations. In contrast to most existing approaches, the heuristic focuses on good partition shapes rather than on minimizing the classical edge-cut metric. By applying Algebraic Multigrid (AMG), we are able to speed up the two most time consuming calculations of the approach while maintaining its large amount of natural parallelism