On the acceleration of flow-oriented circuit clustering

Flow-based method has been successful in producing high-quality circuit clusterings at the expense of long running time. In this paper, we explore the tradeoff between clustering quality and running time. We show that optimum flow distribution, which is a key concept of flow-based clustering, may not be indispensable if some compromise of the clustering result is allowed. By releasing the demand for optimum flow distribution, significant speedup can be achieved. Our result provides an alternative to applications where fast yet reasonably good clustering is required