Multi-Jagged: A Scalable Parallel Spatial Partitioning Algorithm

Abstract

Geometric partitioning is fast and effective for load-balancing dynamic applications, particularly those requiring geometric locality of data (particle methods, crash simulations). We present, to our knowledge, the first parallel implementation of a multidimensional-jagged geometric partitioner. In contrast to the traditional recursive coordinate bisection algorithm (RCB), which recursively bisects subdomains perpendicular to their longest dimension until the desired number of parts is obtained, our algorithm does recursive multi-section with a given number of parts in each dimension. By computing multiple cut lines concurrently and intelligently deciding when to migrate data while computing the partition, we minimize data movement compared to efficient implementations of recursive bisection. We demonstrate the algorithm’s scalability and quality relative to the RCB implementation in Zoltan on both real and synthetic datasets. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithm performs and scales better than RCB in terms of run-time without degrading the load balance. Our implementation partitions 24 billion points into 65,536 parts within a few seconds and exhibits near perfect weak scaling up to 6K cores.