  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.
