HP MLIB User's Guide Vol. 2 7th Ed.

966 HP MLIB User’s Guide
What you need to know to use these routines
The ordering of the nodes is not important for triangle and tetrahedra
elements. However, in the case of hexahedra, the nodes for each element must
be ordered on a specific order (refer to METIS User’s Guide).
Partitioning Objectives
The partitioning algorithms in METIS can be used to compute a balanced
K-way partitioning that minimizes either the number of edges that straddle
partitions (edgecut) or the total communication volume (totalv). (For a complete
description refer the METIS User’s Guide.):
• Minimizing the Edge-Cut: The edge-cut cost function is used to minimize
the number of edges connecting distinct partitions.
• Minimizing the Total Communication Volume: The edge-cut cost function
may not be the best choice when minimizing communication costs.
Minimizing the total communication volume takes into account the number
of neighbors and the communication volume incurred by the partitioning
given that each interface vertex needs to communicate with multiple
partitions.