Automatic Mesh Partitioning

This paper describes an efficient approach to partitioning unstructured meshes that occur naturally in the finite element and finite difference methods. This approach makes use of the underlying geometric structure of a given mesh and finds a provably good partition in random O(n) time. It applies to meshes in both two and three dimensions. The new method has applications in efficient sequential and parallel algorithms for large-scale problems in scientific computing. This is an overview paper written with emphasis on the algorithmic aspects of the approach. Many detailed proofs can be found in companion papers.