Comparing Nested Dissection Orderings for Parallel Sparse Matrix Factorization

In this paper we compare nested dissection orderings obtained by diierent graph bisection heuristics. In the context of parallel sparse matrix factorization the quality of an ordering is not only determined by its ll reducing capability, but also depends on the dif-culty with which a balanced mapping of the load onto the processors of the parallel computer can be found. Our analysis shows that sophisticated local bisection heuristics combined with the mul-tilevel method result in high quality orderings. Furthermore, these orderings can be computed in a reasonable amount of time.