Automatic partitioning of unstructured grids into connected components

Abstract

This paper presents two partitioning schemes that guarantee connected components given a connected initial grid. Connected components are important for convergence of methods such as domain decomposition or multigrid. For many of the grids tested, the schemes produce partitions as good (in terms of number of cut edges) or better than spectral partitioning and require only modest computational resources. This paper describes the two schemes in detail and presents comparison results from a number of two and three dimensional unstructured grids.