Vertex Separators for Partitioning a Graph

Abstract

Finite Element Method (FEM) is a well known technique extensively studiedfor spatial and temporal modeling of environmental processes, weather predictioncomputations, and intelligent signal processing for wireless sensors. The need for hugecomputational power arising in such applications to simulate physical phenomenoncorrectly mandates the use of massively parallel computers to distribute the workloadevenly. In this study, a novel heuristic algorithm called Line Graph Bisection whichpartitions a graph via vertex separators so as to balance the workload amongst theprocessors and to minimize the communication overhead is proposed. The proposedalgorithm is proved to be computationally feasible and makes cost-effective parallelimplementations possible to speed up the solution process.