A Parallel Multilevel Metaheuristic for Graph Partitioning

One significant problem of optimisation which occurs in many scientific areas is that of graph partitioning. Several heuristics, which pertain to high quality partitions, have been put forward. Multilevel schemes can in fact improve the quality of the solutions. However, the size of the graphs is very large in many applications, making it impossible to effectively explore the search space. In these cases, parallel processing becomes a very useful tool overcoming this problem. In this paper, we propose a new parallel algorithm which uses a hybrid heuristic within a multilevel scheme. It is able to obtain very high quality partitions and improvement on those obtained by other algorithms previously put forward.