newbie question: can a vertex be pinned to a fixed partition?

From a previous post I found a statement of Metis as "Metis's heuristic algorithms have been optimized for partitioning large unstructured graphs and they almost always fail to produce good solutions for relatively simple problems."

In my case, the size of the graph is about tens to a couple of hundreds vertice, and the resulting partition is < 4. And I'm looking for MIN-CUT. Should Metis be good for problems of such size? Thanks!

Hey, thank you! The pre-assigned option in hMetis sounds perfect for my requirement. Before this, I was thinking to trick Metis to do so. Do you think if thus also works?

To be more specific, I need to partition the graph with MIN-CUT into 2 to 4 partitions, where two kinds of vertice need to be pre-assigned:

1) In each partition, we make sure there is one and only one special vertex: S0 for part0, S1 for part1, (or S2, S3 if more than 2 partitions);
2) Another set of vertice that need to be pre-assigned to part0.

To achieve the above using Metis, I was thinking FIRST to assign a very big balancing weight to S0, S1 (S2, S3), and 0 weight to all the rest vertice. Thus the balancing paritioning will hopefully put each S vertex to a different partition. Also SECONDLY, to achieve 2), an edge of 0 weight is added between S0 to each and every vertex in the set that has to be pre-assigned to part0, and an edge of a very big weight from each of the other S vertex to each of vertex in this same set. Thus hopefully the MIN-CUT will put this set of vertice together with S0 to part0.

Sorry about writing such a length description.... Your suggestions are really highly appreciated!!