Scalable parallel graph partitioning

Abstract

We consider partitioning a graph in parallel using a large number of processors. Parallel multilevel partitioners, such as Pt-Scotch and ParMetis, produce good quality partitions but their performance scales poorly. Coordinate bisection schemes such as those in Zoltan, which can be applied only to graphs with coordinates, scale well but partition quality is often compromised. We seek to address this gap by developing a scalable parallel scheme which imparts coordinates to a graph through a lattice-based multilevel embedding. Partitions are computed with a parallel formulation of a geometric scheme that has been shown to provide provably good cuts on certain classes of graphs. We analyze the parallel complexity of our scheme and we observe speed-ups and cut-sizes on large graphs. Our results indicate that our method is substantially faster than ParMetis and Pt-Scotch for hundreds to thousands of processors, while producing high quality cuts.