AN EVALUATION OF HEURISTIC METHODS FOR THE BANDWIDTH REDUCTION OF LARGE-SCALE GRAPHS

This paper studies the bandwidth reduction problem for large-scale sparse matrices in serial computations. A heuristic for bandwidth reduction reorders the rows and columns of a given sparse matrix, placing entries with a non-null value as close to the main diagonal as possible. Recently, a paper proposed the FNCHC+ heuristic. The heuristic method is a variant of the Fast Node Centroid Hill-Climbing algorithm. The FNCHC+ heuristic presented better results than the other existing heuristics in the literature when applied to reduce the bandwidth of large-scale graphs (of the underline matrices) with sizes up to 18.6 million vertices and up to 57.2 million edges. The present paper provides new experiments with even larger graphs. Specifically, the present study performs experiments with test problems containing up to 24 million vertices and 130 million edges. The results confirm that the FNCHC+ algorithm is the state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithm for reducing the bandwidth of large-scale matrices.