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Alexander Noe

Publications and source records attributed to Alexander Noe.

15 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Agentic Algorithm Engineering: Improving Shared-Memory Exact Minimum Cuts

The minimum cut problem for an undirected edge-weighted graph asks us to divide its set of nodes into two blocks while minimizing the weighted sum of the cut edges. Over the last years, we engineered a range of fast algorithms for this problem. Our fastest exact algorithm uses an inexact algorithm to obtain a better bound for the problem, reductions that depend on this bound, improved data structures and parallel contraction routines. It is available in the open-source package VieCut and, on real-world instances, outperformed the previously fastest solvers by a factor of up to 2.5 sequentially and up to 12.9 when run in parallel. We improve this algorithm using agentic algorithm engineering (AAE), a methodology that we introduce here, in which autonomous large language model agents run the algorithm engineering cycle on an existing code base: they form hypotheses about where running time is lost, implement them, benchmark the result on a fixed instance set and keep or discard the change. Even though we had already tuned our algorithm by hand extensively, the agent finds significant optimizations, in particular on the DIMACS core instances: factors of 1.28 (sequential) and 1.63 (32 threads) on real-world k-cores, and 6.26 and 127 on the DIMACS core instances.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2022

A Metaheuristic Algorithm for Large Maximum Weight Independent Set Problems

Motivated by a real-world vehicle routing application, we consider the maximum-weight independent set problem: Given a node-weighted graph, find a set of independent (mutually nonadjacent) nodes whose node-weight sum is maximum. Some of the graphs airsing in this application are large, having hundreds of thousands of nodes and hundreds of millions of edges. To solve instances of this size, we develop a new local search algorithm, which is a metaheuristic in the greedy randomized adaptive search (GRASP) framework. This algorithm, which we call METAMIS, uses a wider range of simple local search operations than previously described in the literature. We introduce data structures that make these operations efficient. A new variant of path-relinking is introduced to escape local optima and so is a new alternating augmenting-path local search move that improves algorithm performance. We compare an implementation of our algorithm with a state-of-the-art openly available code on public benchmark sets, including some large instances with hundreds of millions of vertices. Our algorithm is, in general, competitive and outperforms this openly available code on large vehicle routing instances. We hope that our results will lead to even better MWIS algorithms.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2021

Random Rank-Based, Hierarchical or Trivial: Which Dynamic Graph Algorithm Performs Best in Practice?

Fully dynamic graph algorithms that achieve polylogarithmic or better time per operation use either a hierarchical graph decomposition or random-rank based approach. There are so far two graph properties for which efficient algorithms for both types of data structures exist, namely fully dynamic (Delta + 1) coloring and fully dynamic maximal matching. In this paper we present an extensive experimental study of these two types of algorithms for these two problems together with very simple baseline algorithms to determine which of these algorithms are the fastest. Our results indicate that the data structures used by the different algorithms dominate their performance.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2021

Algorithm Engineering for Cut Problems

Graphs are a natural representation of data from various contexts, such as social connections, the web, road networks, and many more. In the last decades, many of these networks have become enormous, requiring efficient algorithms to cut networks into smaller, more readily comprehensible blocks. In this work, we aim to partition the vertices of a graph into multiple blocks while minimizing the number of edges that connect different blocks. There is a multitude of cut or partitioning problems that have been the focus of research for multiple decades. This work develops highly-efficient algorithms for the (global) minimum cut problem, the balanced graph partitioning problem and the multiterminal cut problem. All of these algorithms are efficient in practice and freely available for use.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2021

Practical Fully Dynamic Minimum Cut Algorithms

We present a practically efficient algorithm for maintaining a global minimum cut in large dynamic graphs under both edge insertions and deletions. While there has been theoretical work on this problem, our algorithm is the first implementation of a fully-dynamic algorithm. The algorithm uses the theoretical foundation and combines it with efficient and finely-tuned implementations to give an algorithm that can maintain the global minimum cut of a graph with rapid update times. We show that our algorithm gives up to multiple orders of magnitude speedup compared to static approaches both on edge insertions and deletions.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2020

Recent Advances in Practical Data Reduction

Over the last two decades, significant advances have been made in the design and analysis of fixed-parameter algorithms for a wide variety of graph-theoretic problems. This has resulted in an algorithmic toolbox that is by now well-established. However, these theoretical algorithmic ideas have received very little attention from the practical perspective. We survey recent trends in data reduction engineering results for selected problems. Moreover, we describe concrete techniques that may be useful for future implementations in the area and give open problems and research questions.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2020

Faster Parallel Multiterminal Cuts

We give an improved branch-and-bound solver for the multiterminal cut problem, based on the recent work of Henzinger et al.. We contribute new, highly effective data reduction rules to transform the graph into a smaller equivalent instance. In addition, we present a local search algorithm that can significantly improve a given solution to the multiterminal cut problem. Our exact algorithm is able to give exact solutions to more and harder problems compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm by Henzinger et al.; and give better solutions for more than two third of the problems that are too large to be solved to optimality. Additionally, we give an inexact heuristic algorithm that computes high-quality solutions for very hard instances in reasonable time.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2020

Finding All Global Minimum Cuts In Practice

We present a practically efficient algorithm that finds all global minimum cuts in huge undirected graphs. Our algorithm uses a multitude of kernelization rules to reduce the graph to a small equivalent instance and then finds all minimum cuts using an optimized version of the algorithm of Nagamochi, Nakao and Ibaraki. In shared memory we are able to find all minimum cuts of graphs with up to billions of edges and millions of minimum cuts in a few minutes. We also give a new linear time algorithm to find the most balanced minimum cuts given as input the representation of all minimum cuts.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2019

Shared-Memory Branch-and-Reduce for Multiterminal Cuts

We introduce the fastest known exact algorithm~for~the multiterminal cut problem with k terminals. In particular, we engineer existing as well as new data reduction rules. We use the rules within a branch-and-reduce framework and to boost the performance of an ILP formulation. Our algorithms achieve improvements in running time of up to multiple orders of magnitudes over the ILP formulation without data reductions, which has been the de facto standard used by practitioners. This allows us to solve instances to optimality that are significantly larger than was previously possible.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2018

Shared-memory Exact Minimum Cuts

The minimum cut problem for an undirected edge-weighted graph asks us to divide its set of nodes into two blocks while minimizing the weight sum of the cut edges. In this paper, we engineer the fastest known exact algorithm for the problem. State-of-the-art algorithms like the algorithm of Padberg and Rinaldi or the algorithm of Nagamochi, Ono and Ibaraki identify edges that can be contracted to reduce the graph size such that at least one minimum cut is maintained in the contracted graph. Our algorithm achieves improvements in running time over these algorithms by a multitude of techniques. First, we use a recently developed fast and parallel \emph{inexact} minimum cut algorithm to obtain a better bound for the problem. Then we use reductions that depend on this bound, to reduce the size of the graph much faster than previously possible. We use improved data structures to further improve the running time of our algorithm. Additionally, we parallelize the contraction routines of Nagamochi, Ono and Ibaraki. Overall, we arrive at a system that outperforms the fastest state-of-the-art solvers for the \emph{exact} minimum cut problem significantly.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2018

ILP-based Local Search for Graph Partitioning

Computing high-quality graph partitions is a challenging problem with numerous applications. In this paper, we present a novel meta-heuristic for the balanced graph partitioning problem. Our approach is based on integer linear programs that solve the partitioning problem to optimality. However, since those programs typically do not scale to large inputs, we adapt them to heuristically improve a given partition. We do so by defining a much smaller model that allows us to use symmetry breaking and other techniques that make the approach scalable. For example, in Walshaw's well-known benchmark tables we are able to improve roughly half of all entries when the number of blocks is high.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2017

Practical Minimum Cut Algorithms

The minimum cut problem for an undirected edge-weighted graph asks us to divide its set of nodes into two blocks while minimizing the weight sum of the cut edges. Here, we introduce a linear-time algorithm to compute near-minimum cuts. Our algorithm is based on cluster contraction using label propagation and Padberg and Rinaldi's contraction heuristics [SIAM Review, 1991]. We give both sequential and shared-memory parallel implementations of our algorithm. Extensive experiments on both real-world and generated instances show that our algorithm finds the optimal cut on nearly all instances significantly faster than other state-of-the-art algorithms while our error rate is lower than that of other heuristic algorithms. In addition, our parallel algorithm shows good scalability.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2016

Thrill: High-Performance Algorithmic Distributed Batch Data Processing with C++

We present the design and a first performance evaluation of Thrill -- a prototype of a general purpose big data processing framework with a convenient data-flow style programming interface. Thrill is somewhat similar to Apache Spark and Apache Flink with at least two main differences. First, Thrill is based on C++ which enables performance advantages due to direct native code compilation, a more cache-friendly memory layout, and explicit memory management. In particular, Thrill uses template meta-programming to compile chains of subsequent local operations into a single binary routine without intermediate buffering and with minimal indirections. Second, Thrill uses arrays rather than multisets as its primary data structure which enables additional operations like sorting, prefix sums, window scans, or combining corresponding fields of several arrays (zipping). We compare Thrill with Apache Spark and Apache Flink using five kernels from the HiBench suite. Thrill is consistently faster and often several times faster than the other frameworks. At the same time, the source codes have a similar level of simplicity and abstraction

cs.DC↗
arXiv2015

Algorithms for Mapping Parallel Processes onto Grid and Torus Architectures

Static mapping is the assignment of parallel processes to the processing elements (PEs) of a parallel system, where the assignment does not change during the application's lifetime. In our scenario we model an application's computations and their dependencies by an application graph. This graph is first partitioned into (nearly) equally sized blocks. These blocks need to communicate at block boundaries. To assign the processes to PEs, our goal is to compute a communication-efficient bijective mapping between the blocks and the PEs. This approach of partitioning followed by bijective mapping has many degrees of freedom. Thus, users and developers of parallel applications need to know more about which choices work for which application graphs and which parallel architectures. To this end, we not only develop new mapping algorithms (derived from known greedy methods). We also perform extensive experiments involving different classes of application graphs (meshes and complex networks), architectures of parallel computers (grids and tori), as well as different partitioners and mapping algorithms. Surprisingly, the quality of the partitions, unless very poor, has little influence on the quality of the mapping. More importantly, one of our new mapping algorithms always yields the best results in terms of the quality measure maximum congestion when the application graphs are complex networks. In case of meshes as application graphs, this mapping algorithm always leads in terms of maximum congestion AND maximum dilation, another common quality measure.

cs.DS↗