Publisher review:Chaco is a software that allows you to partition graphs for parallel computing and scientific simulations. Chaco has contributed to a wide variety of computational studies including investigation of the molecular structure of liquid crystals, evaluating the design of a chemical vapor deposition reactor and modeling automobile collisions.
The algorithms developed for Chaco have also been successfully applied to a number of problems which have nothing to do with parallel computing. These include the determination of genomic sequences (a critical part of the Human Genome Project), the design of space-efficient circuit placements, organization of databases for efficient retrieval, and ordering of sparse matrices for efficient factorization. The code can also be used more generally to identify data locality.
Chaco contains a wide variety of algorithms and options, many of which were invented by the authors. Some of the algorithms exploit the geometry of the mesh, others its local connectivity or its global structure as captured by eigenvectors of a related matrix. These methods can be mixed and matched in several ways, and combinations often prove to be more effective than any single technique in isolation. All these algorithms are accessed via a simple user interface, or a call from other software. Innovations in Chaco include: - Development of multilevel graph partitioning. This widely imitated approach has become the premiere algorithm combining very high quality with short calculation times.
- Extension of spectral partitioning to enable the use of 2 or 3 Laplacian eigenvectors to quadrisect of octasect a graph.
- Highly efficient and robust eigensolvers for use with spectral graph algorithms.
- Generalization of the Kernighan-Lin/Fiduccia-Mattheyses algorithm to handle weighted graphs, arbitrary number of sets and lazy initiation.
- Development of skewed partitioning to improve the mapping of a graph onto a target parallel architecture.
- Various post-processing options to improve partitions in a number of ways.
Chaco is a C/C++ script for osCommerce Addons scripts design by Bruce Hendrickson.
It runs on following operating system: Linux / BSD.
Operating system:Linux / BSD
Chaco script details 
