These are METIS libraries for Windows. METIS is a set of serial programs for partitioning graphs, partitioning finite element meshes, and producing fill reducing orderings for sparse matrices. Official METIS information: "A Fast and Highly Quality Multilevel Scheme for Partitioning Irregular Graphs". George Karypis and Vipin Kumar. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 359--392, 1999. VERSION: 5.1.0, official source release from: http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/metis/metis/download Setup for solution: 1. Unpack metis-5.1.0.tar.gz 2. If not installed yet, install latest CMake 3. Generate Visual Studio solution with vsgen.bat (in directory metis-5.1.0) 4. Adapt metis.vcxproj into your solution. 5. Remove CMAKE stuff from this project 6. Configure Platforms and Configurations It is a little bit of a hassle, but metis does not change to often anymore. From now one no problems with newer IDE's anymore.