Multi-level direct K-way hypergraph partitioning with multiple constraints and fixed vertices

K-way hypergraph partitioning has an ever-growing use in parallelization of scientific computing applications. We claim that hypergraph partitioning with multiple constraints and fixed vertices should be implemented using direct K-way refinement, instead of the widely adopted recursive bisection paradigm. Our arguments are based on the fact that recursive-bisection-based partitioning algorithms perform considerably worse when used in the multiple constraint and fixed vertex formulations. We discuss possible reasons for this performance degradation. We describe a careful implementation of a multi-level direct K-way hypergraph partitioning algorithm, which performs better than a well-known recursive-bisection-based partitioning algorithm in hypergraph partitioning with multiple constraints and fixed vertices. We also experimentally show that the proposed algorithm is effective in standard hypergraph partitioning. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.