ComPart: Community-Guided Post-Coarsening for High-Quality Hypergraph Partitioning
This work improves hypergraph partitioning quality for embedded system design tasks like task mapping on MPSoCs and multi-FPGA prototyping.
ComPart introduces a new paradigm for hypergraph partitioning that uses community detection during post-coarsening stages to escape local optima and find better solutions, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks.
Hypergraph partitioning is a critical step in the design of complex embedded systems, essential for optimizing task mapping on heterogeneous MPSoCs and enabling multi-FPGA prototyping. Many existing methods rely on community detection to identify modules with dense internal and sparse external connections, typically utilizing them to constrain the coarsening phase--a widely adopted paradigm. In this work, we propose ComPart, a generalized framework that integrates diverse community detection methods to uncover high-quality clusterings throughout the post-coarsening stages (i.e., initial partitioning and uncoarsening). These discovered clusterings serve as distinct structural guides, enabling the refinement process to identify superior partitioning solutions. Our framework offers two key advantages: (1) it establishes a new paradigm that leverages community structures detected during uncoarsening to escape local optima and explore globally meaningful solution subspaces, transcending the limitations of standard local refinements; and (2) it flexibly accommodates both existing and future community detection methods. Furthermore, we theoretically generalize locally-dense decomposition--originally from graphs--to the hypergraph domain. We provide the formal extension and necessary proofs to apply this technique to hypergraphs, marking its first application in hypergraph partitioning. Specifically, we utilize this rigorously derived decomposition to guide the initial partitioning phase toward superior starting points. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in solution quality.