A Distributed Partitioning Software and its Applications

Abstract: This article describes a geometric partitioning software that can be used for quick computation of data partitions on many-core HPC machines. It is most suited for dynamic applications with load distributions that vary with time. Partitioning costs were minimized with a lot of care, to tolerate frequent adjustments to the load distribution. The partitioning algorithm uses both geometry as well as statistics collected from the data distribution. The implementation is based on a hybrid programming model that is both distributed and multi-threaded. Partitions are computed by a hierarchical data decomposition, followed by data ordering using space-filling curves and greedy knapsack. This software was primarily used for partitioning 2 and 3 dimensional meshes in scientific computing. It was also used to solve point-location problems and for partitioning general graphs. The experiments described in this paper provide useful performance data for important parallel algorithms on a HPC machine built using a recent many-core processor designed for data-intensive applications by providing large on-chip memory.