Enhancing Data Locality by Using Terminal Propagation

Terminal propagation is a method developed in the circuit placement community for adding constraints to graph partitioning problems. This paper adapts and expands this idea, and applies it to the problem of partitioning data structures among the processors of a parallel computer. We show how the constmints in terminal propagation can be used to encourage partitions in which messages are communicated only between architecturally nea.r processors. We then show how these constraints can be handled in two important partitioning algorithms, spectral bisection and multilevelKL. We compare the quality of partitions generated by these algorithms to each other a.nd to partitions generated by more familiar techniques.