Parallel Graph Partitioning for Complex Networks

Processing large complex networks like social networks or web graphs has recently attracted considerable interest. To do this in parallel, we need to partition them into pieces of about equal size. Unfortunately, previous parallel graph practitioners originally developed for more regular mesh-like networks do not work well for these networks. This paper addresses this problem by parallelizing and adapting the label propagation technique originally developed for graph clustering. By introducing size constraints, label propagation becomes applicable for both the coarsening and the refinement phase of multilevel graph partitioning. We obtain very high quality by applying a highly parallel evolutionary algorithm to the coarsest graph. The resulting system is both more scalable and achieves higher quality than state-of-the-art systems like ParMetis or PT-Scotch. For large complex networks the performance differences are very big. As an example, our algorithm partitions a web graph with 3.3G edges in 16 seconds using 512 cores of a high-performance cluster while producing a high quality partition -- none of the competing systems can handle this graph on our system.