Mesh partitioning is an indispensable tool for efficient parallel numerical simulations. Its goal is to minimize communication between the processes of a simulation while achieving load balance. Established graph-based partitioning tools yield a high solution quality; however, their scalability is limited. Geometric approaches usually scale better, but their solution quality may be unsatisfactory for "non-trivial" mesh topologies. In this paper, we present a scalable version of k-means that is adapted to yield balanced clusters. Balanced k-means constitutes the core of our new partitioning algorithm Geographer. Bootstrapping of initial centers is performed with space-filling curves, leading to fast convergence of the subsequent balanced k-means algorithm. Our experiments with up to 16 384 MPI processes on numerous benchmark meshes show the following: (i) Geographer produces partitions with a lower communication volume than state-of-the-art geometric partitioners from the Zoltan package; (ii) Geographer scales well on large inputs; (iii) a Delaunay mesh with a few billion vertices and edges can be partitioned in a few seconds.
The benefit of optimizing block shapes has been acknowledged in a number of publications, not only for certain applications @cite_20 , but also for established graph metrics @cite_43 . However, previous shape-optimizing approaches suffer from a relatively high running time for static partitioning @cite_8 @cite_43 @cite_7 and limited scalability @cite_20 @cite_16 .
@cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_43 @cite_16 @cite_20
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Graph partitioning requires the division of a graph's vertex set into k equally sized subsets s.t. some objective function is optimized. High-quality partitions are important for many applications, whose objective functions are often NP-hard to optimize. Most state-of-the-art graph partitioning libraries use a variant of the Kernighan-Lin (KL) heuristic within a multilevel framework. While these libraries are very fast, their solutions do not always meet all user requirements. Moreover, due to its sequential nature, KL is not easy to parallelize. Its use as a load balancer in parallel numerical applications therefore requires complicated adaptations. That is why we developed previously an inherently parallel algorithm, called Bubble-FOS C [H. Meyerhenke, B. Monien, S. Schamberger, Accelerating shape optimizing load balancing for parallel FEM simulations by algebraic multigrid, in: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS'06, IEEE Computer Society, 2006, p. 57 (CD)], which optimizes partition shapes by a diffusive mechanism. However, it is too slow for practical use, despite its high solution quality. In this paper, besides proving that Bubble-FOS C converges towards a local optimum of a potential function, we develop a much faster method for the improvement of partitionings. This faster method called TruncCons is based on a different diffusive process, which is restricted to local areas of the graph and also contains a high degree of parallelism. By coupling TruncCons with Bubble-FOS C in a multilevel framework based on two different hierarchy construction methods, we obtain our new graph partitioning heuristic DibaP. Compared to Bubble-FOS C, DibaP shows a considerable acceleration, while retaining the positive properties of the slower algorithm. Experiments with popular benchmark graphs show that DibaP computes consistently better results than the state-of-the-art libraries METIS and JOSTLE. Moreover, with our new algorithm, we have improved the best known edge-cut values for a significant number of partitionings of six widely used benchmark graphs. Block transform coded images usually suffer from annoying artifacts at low bit rates, caused by the coarse quantization of transform coefficients. In this paper, we propose a new method to reduce compression artifacts by the overlapped-block transform coefficient estimation from non-local blocks. In the proposed method, the discrete cosine transform coefficients of each block are estimated by adaptively fusing two prediction values based on their reliabilities. One prediction is the quantized values of coefficients decoded from the compressed bitstream, whose reliability is determined by quantization steps. The other prediction is the weighted average of the coefficients in nonlocal blocks, whose reliability depends on the variance of the coefficients in these blocks. The weights are used to distinguish the effectiveness of the coefficients in nonlocal blocks to predict original coefficients and are determined by block similarity in transform domain. To solve the optimization problem, the overlapped blocks are divided into several subsets. Each subset contains nonoverlapped blocks covering the whole image and is optimized independently. Therefore, the overall optimization is reduced to a set of sub-optimization problems, which can be easily solved. Finally, we provide a strategy for parameter selection based on the compression levels. Experimental results show that the proposed method can remarkably reduce compression artifacts and significantly improve both the subjective and objective qualities of block transform coded images. Geometric partitioning is fast and effective for load-balancing dynamic applications, particularly those requiring geometric locality of data (particle methods, crash simulations). We present, to our knowledge, the first parallel implementation of a multidimensional-jagged geometric partitioner. In contrast to the traditional recursive coordinate bisection algorithm (RCB), which recursively bisects subdomains perpendicular to their longest dimension until the desired number of parts is obtained, our algorithm does recursive multi-section with a given number of parts in each dimension. By computing multiple cut lines concurrently and intelligently deciding when to migrate data while computing the partition, we minimize data movement compared to efficient implementations of recursive bisection. We demonstrate the algorithm’s scalability and quality relative to the RCB implementation in Zoltan on both real and synthetic datasets. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm performs and scales better than RCB in terms of run-time without degrading the load balance. Our implementation partitions 24 billion points into 65,536 parts within a few seconds and exhibits near perfect weak scaling up to 6K cores. We propose a novel partitioning method for block-structured adaptive meshes utilizing the meshless Lagrangian particle concept. With the observation that an optimum partitioning has high analogy to the relaxation of a multi-phase fluid to steady state, physically motivated model equations are developed to characterize the background mesh topology and are solved by multi-phase smoothed-particle hydrodynamics. In contrast to well established partitioning approaches, all optimization objectives are implicitly incorporated and achieved during the particle relaxation to stationary state. Distinct partitioning sub-domains are represented by colored particles and separated by a sharp interface with a surface tension model. In order to obtain the particle relaxation, special viscous and skin friction models, coupled with a tailored time integration algorithm are proposed. Numerical experiments show that the present method has several important properties: generation of approximately equal-sized partitions without dependence on the mesh-element type, optimized interface communication between distinct partitioning sub-domains, continuous domain decomposition which is physically localized and implicitly incremental. Therefore it is particularly suitable for load-balancing of high-performance CFD simulations.