METIS is a set of serial programs for partitioning graphs, partitioning finite element meshes, and producing fill reducing orderings for sparse matrices.

The algorithms implemented in METIS are based on the multilevel recursive-bisection, multilevel k-way, and multi-constraint partitioning schemes developed in our lab.

METIS is being developed entirely in ANSI C, and is therefore portable on most Unix systems that have an ANSI C compiler (the GNU C compiler will do).

METIS has been extensively tested on AIX, Sun OS, Solaris, IRIX, Linux, HP-UX, BSD, and Unicos.

Here are some key features of "METIS":

Provides high quality partitions:
· Experiments on a large number of graphs arising in various domains including finite element methods, linear programming, VLSI, and transportation show that METIS produces partitions that are consistently better than those produced by other widely used algorithms. The partitions produced by METIS are consistently 10% to 50% better than those produced by spectral partitioning algorithms.

It is extremely fast:
· Experiments on a wide range of graphs has shown that METIS is one to two orders of magnitude faster than other widely used partitioning algorithms. Graphs with over 1,000,000 vertices can be partitioned in 256 parts in a few seconds on current generation workstations and PCs.

Produces low fill orderings:
· The fill-reducing orderings produced by METIS are significantly better than those produced by other widely used algorithms including multiple minimum degree. For many classes of problems arising in scientific computations and linear programming, METIS is able to reduce the storage and computational requirements of sparse matrix factorization, by up to an order of magnitude. Moreover, unlike multiple minimum degree, the elimination trees produced by METIS are suitable for parallel direct factorization. Furthermore, METIS is able to compute these orderings very fast. Matrices with over 200,000 rows can be reordered in just a few seconds on current generation workstations and PCs.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Fixed some bugs in the multi-constraint partitioning routines
· Fixed some bugs in the volume-minimization routines