NPAC Technical Report SCCS-476

An Object Oriented Recursive Bisection Algorithm for the CM-5

Gregor von Laszewski

Submitted April 16 1993


Abstract

Recursive bisection is a very fast partitioning strategy. It is often used for dividing points in a two dimensional plane into a number of partitions containing an approximately equal number of points. The membership of a point to a specific partition is specified by its location in the two dimensional plane. This scheme can be generalized in two ways. First, the bisection algorithm can be expanded to multidimensional planes. Second, the algorithm can be used on any plane for which a linear order between the elements is defined. This report presents an object-oriented approach using a multi dimensional recursive bisection algorithm on a distributed memory architecture. By specifying the number of planes and their linear order for each plane a variety of real problems can be solved with minimum effort. Results for partitioning two dimensional planes on the CM5 are given.


PostScript version of the paper