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BuffCut: Prioritized Buffered Streaming Graph Partitioning

Authors Linus Baumgärtner , Adil Chhabra , Marcelo Fonseca Faraj , Christian Schulz

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LIPIcs.SEA.2026.5.pdf
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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Streaming, sublinear and near linear time algorithms
Keywords
  • graph partitioning
  • streaming
  • online
  • buffered
  • prioritized partitioning

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Abstract

Streaming graph partitioners enable resource-efficient and massively scalable partitioning, but one-pass assignment heuristics are highly sensitive to stream order and often yield substantially higher edge cuts than in-memory methods. We present BuffCut, a buffered streaming partitioner that narrows this quality gap, particularly when stream ordering is adversarial, by combining prioritized buffering with batch-wise multilevel assignment. BuffCut maintains a bounded priority buffer to delay poorly informed decisions and regulate the order in which nodes are considered for assignment. It incrementally constructs high-locality batches of configurable size by iteratively inserting the highest-priority nodes from the buffer into the batch, effectively recovering locality structure from the stream. Each batch is then assigned via a multilevel partitioning algorithm. Experiments on diverse real-world and synthetic graphs show that BuffCut consistently outperforms state-of-the-art buffered streaming methods. Compared to the strongest prioritized buffering baseline, BuffCut achieves 20.8% fewer edge cuts while running 2.9× faster and using 11.3× less memory. Against the next-best batched method, it reduces edge cut by 15.8% with only modest overheads of 1.8× runtime and 1.09× memory.

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Linus Baumgärtner, Adil Chhabra, Marcelo Fonseca Faraj, and Christian Schulz. BuffCut: Prioritized Buffered Streaming Graph Partitioning. In 24th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 371, pp. 5:1-5:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2026.5

Author Details

Linus Baumgärtner
  • Heidelberg University, Germany
Adil Chhabra
  • Heidelberg University, Germany
Marcelo Fonseca Faraj
  • A+W Software, Fenwald, Germany
Christian Schulz
  • Heidelberg University, Germany

Funding

We acknowledge support by DFG grant SCHU 2567/5-1.

Acknowledgements

Moreover, we would like to acknowledge Dagstuhl Seminar 23331 on Recent Trends in Graph Decomposition.

Supplementary Materials

References

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