Social Hash Partitioner: A Scalable Distributed Hypergraph Partitioner

Abstract: We design and implement a distributed algorithm for balanced $k$-way hypergraph partitioning that minimizes fanout, a fundamental hypergraph quantity also known as the communication volume and ($k-1$)-cut metric, by optimizing a novel objective called probabilistic fanout. This choice allows a simple local search heuristic to achieve comparable solution quality to the best existing hypergraph partitioners. Our algorithm is arbitrarily scalable due to a careful design that controls computational complexity, space complexity, and communication. In practice, we commonly process hypergraphs with billions of vertices and hyperedges in a few hours. We explain how the algorithm's scalability, both in terms of hypergraph size and bucket count, is limited only by the number of machines available. We perform an extensive comparison to existing distributed hypergraph partitioners and find that our approach is able to optimize hypergraphs roughly $100$ times bigger on the same set of machines. We call the resulting tool Social Hash Partitioner (SHP), and accompanying this paper, we open-source the most scalable version based on recursive bisection.