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
