A linear solver for benchmarking partitioners

Abstract

A number of graph partitioners are currently available for solving linear systems on parallel computers. Partitioning algorithms divide the graph that arises from the linear system into a specified number of partitions such that the workload per processor is balanced and the communication between the processors is minimized. The measure of partition quality is often taken to be the number of edges cut by the partition. Ultimately the quality of a partition will be reflected in the execution time of the parallel application. In this paper, we introduce a linear solver benchmark that enables comparison of partition quality. This work also serves to motivate further work on developing benchmarks for graph partitioners.