Communication-Aware Processor Allocation for Supercomputers
  This paper gives processor-allocation algorithms for minimizing the average number of communication hops between the assigned processors for grid architectures, in the presence of occupied cells. The simpler problem of assigning processors on a free grid has been studied by Karp, McKellar, and Wong who show that the solutions have nontrivial structure; they left open the complexity of the problem.   The associated clustering problem is as follows: Given n points in Re^d, find k points that minimize their average pairwise L1 distance. We present a natural approximation algorithm and show that it is a 7/4-approximation for 2D grids. For d-dimensional space, the approximation guarantee is 2-(1/2d), which is tight. We also give a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for constant dimension d, and report on experimental results. 
Michael A. Bender, David P. Bunde, Erik D. Demaine, Sandor P. Fekete,   Vitus J. Leung, Henk Meijer and Cynthia A. Phillips