A distributed algorithm for k-way graph partitioning

Abstract

Graph partitioning is one of the most important problems in solving many large-scale scientific computations. It forms the basis of many wide ranging problems in VLSI CAD ranging from high-level applications like hardware-software partitioning on one hand, to physical design methods like min-cut, on the other. In this paper we describe a novel method of using distributed computing in the form of loosely coupled independent processors on a network to solve the k-way graph partitioning problem. We have implemented this system on a network of workstations using PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine). We have tested the method with benchmarks designs of the Partitioning '93 suite with encouraging results.