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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 45
ADVANCES IN COMPUTATIONAL MECHANICS FOR PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping
Paper III.2

A Tool for the Evaluation of Partitioning Methods

S. Greb, L. Laemmer and U. Meißner

Institute for Numerical Methods and Informatics in Civil Engineering, University of Technology Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
, "A Tool for the Evaluation of Partitioning Methods", in B.H.V. Topping, (Editor), "Advances in Computational Mechanics for Parallel and Distributed Processing", Civil-Comp Press, Edinburgh, UK, pp 73-80, 1997. doi:10.4203/ccp.45.3.2
Abstract
Partitioning a given computational mesh for parallel processing is a very active research topic in parallel computation technology. A large number of solution algorithms exists for the a priori, static partitioning problem. The most efficient algorithms are implemented in program libraries like Chaco or Metis.

Nevertheless, the partitioning problem is known to be combinatorial hard. There is no algorithm producing definitely the best solution. All attempts implement more or less efficient heuristics which may fail due to the special properties of the partitioning problem.

Additionally, the parallel machine used to solve the computational problem and the solution procedure itself have significant influence on the suitability of a given partitioning. We propose a special software tool for evaluating the partitioning results with respect to the characteristics of a chosen parallel machine and the application of an iterative solver.

We approximate the iteration cycle time by a theoretical model of the hard- and software. The comparison of a number of partitionings is based on these practical performance figures.

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