FREIGHT: Fast Streaming Hypergraph Partitioning

Abstract: Partitioning the vertices of a (hyper)graph into k roughly balanced blocks such that few (hyper)edges run between blocks is a key problem for large-scale distributed processing. A current trend for partitioning huge (hyper)graphs using low computational resources are streaming algorithms. In this work, we propose FREIGHT: a Fast stREamInG Hypergraph parTitioning algorithm which is an adaptation of the widely-known graph-based algorithm Fennel. By using an efficient data structure, we make the overall running of FREIGHT linearly dependent on the pin-count of the hypergraph and the memory consumption linearly dependent on the numbers of nets and blocks. The results of our extensive experimentation showcase the promising performance of FREIGHT as a highly efficient and effective solution for streaming hypergraph partitioning. Our algorithm demonstrates competitive running time with the Hashing algorithm, with a difference of a maximum factor of four observed on three fourths of the instances. Significantly, our findings highlight the superiority of FREIGHT over all existing (buffered) streaming algorithms and even the in-memory algorithm HYPE, with respect to both cut-net and connectivity measures. This indicates that our proposed algorithm is a promising hypergraph partitioning tool to tackle the challenge posed by large-scale and dynamic data processing.