24 research outputs found
What Makes a Distributed Problem Truly Local?
International audienceIn this talk we attempt to identify the characteristics of a task of distributed network computing, which make it easy (or hard) to solve by meansof fast local algorithms. We look at specific combinatorial tasks within the LOCAL model of distributed computation, and rephrase some recent algorithmic results in a framework of constraint satisfaction. Finally, we discuss the issue of efficient computability for relaxed variants of the LOCAL model, involving the so-called non-signaling property
Towards a complexity theory for the congested clique
The congested clique model of distributed computing has been receiving
attention as a model for densely connected distributed systems. While there has
been significant progress on the side of upper bounds, we have very little in
terms of lower bounds for the congested clique; indeed, it is now know that
proving explicit congested clique lower bounds is as difficult as proving
circuit lower bounds.
In this work, we use various more traditional complexity-theoretic tools to
build a clearer picture of the complexity landscape of the congested clique:
-- Nondeterminism and beyond: We introduce the nondeterministic congested
clique model (analogous to NP) and show that there is a natural canonical
problem family that captures all problems solvable in constant time with
nondeterministic algorithms. We further generalise these notions by introducing
the constant-round decision hierarchy (analogous to the polynomial hierarchy).
-- Non-constructive lower bounds: We lift the prior non-uniform counting
arguments to a general technique for proving non-constructive uniform lower
bounds for the congested clique. In particular, we prove a time hierarchy
theorem for the congested clique, showing that there are decision problems of
essentially all complexities, both in the deterministic and nondeterministic
settings.
-- Fine-grained complexity: We map out relationships between various natural
problems in the congested clique model, arguing that a reduction-based
complexity theory currently gives us a fairly good picture of the complexity
landscape of the congested clique
New Classes of Distributed Time Complexity
A number of recent papers -- e.g. Brandt et al. (STOC 2016), Chang et al.
(FOCS 2016), Ghaffari & Su (SODA 2017), Brandt et al. (PODC 2017), and Chang &
Pettie (FOCS 2017) -- have advanced our understanding of one of the most
fundamental questions in theory of distributed computing: what are the possible
time complexity classes of LCL problems in the LOCAL model? In essence, we have
a graph problem in which a solution can be verified by checking all
radius- neighbourhoods, and the question is what is the smallest such
that a solution can be computed so that each node chooses its own output based
on its radius- neighbourhood. Here is the distributed time complexity of
.
The time complexity classes for deterministic algorithms in bounded-degree
graphs that are known to exist by prior work are , , , , and . It is also known
that there are two gaps: one between and , and
another between and . It has been conjectured
that many more gaps exist, and that the overall time hierarchy is relatively
simple -- indeed, this is known to be the case in restricted graph families
such as cycles and grids.
We show that the picture is much more diverse than previously expected. We
present a general technique for engineering LCL problems with numerous
different deterministic time complexities, including
for any , for any , and
for any in the high end of the complexity
spectrum, and for any ,
for any , and
for any in the low end; here
is a positive rational number
Distributed -Coloring in Sublogarithmic Rounds
We give a new randomized distributed algorithm for -coloring in
the LOCAL model, running in
rounds in a graph of maximum degree~. This implies that the
-coloring problem is easier than the maximal independent set
problem and the maximal matching problem, due to their lower bounds of by Kuhn, Moscibroda, and Wattenhofer [PODC'04].
Our algorithm also extends to list-coloring where the palette of each node
contains colors. We extend the set of distributed symmetry-breaking
techniques by performing a decomposition of graphs into dense and sparse parts
How Long It Takes for an Ordinary Node with an Ordinary ID to Output?
In the context of distributed synchronous computing, processors perform in
rounds, and the time-complexity of a distributed algorithm is classically
defined as the number of rounds before all computing nodes have output. Hence,
this complexity measure captures the running time of the slowest node(s). In
this paper, we are interested in the running time of the ordinary nodes, to be
compared with the running time of the slowest nodes. The node-averaged
time-complexity of a distributed algorithm on a given instance is defined as
the average, taken over every node of the instance, of the number of rounds
before that node output. We compare the node-averaged time-complexity with the
classical one in the standard LOCAL model for distributed network computing. We
show that there can be an exponential gap between the node-averaged
time-complexity and the classical time-complexity, as witnessed by, e.g.,
leader election. Our first main result is a positive one, stating that, in
fact, the two time-complexities behave the same for a large class of problems
on very sparse graphs. In particular, we show that, for LCL problems on cycles,
the node-averaged time complexity is of the same order of magnitude as the
slowest node time-complexity.
In addition, in the LOCAL model, the time-complexity is computed as a worst
case over all possible identity assignments to the nodes of the network. In
this paper, we also investigate the ID-averaged time-complexity, when the
number of rounds is averaged over all possible identity assignments. Our second
main result is that the ID-averaged time-complexity is essentially the same as
the expected time-complexity of randomized algorithms (where the expectation is
taken over all possible random bits used by the nodes, and the number of rounds
is measured for the worst-case identity assignment).
Finally, we study the node-averaged ID-averaged time-complexity.Comment: (Submitted) Journal versio
On the Complexity of Local Distributed Graph Problems
This paper is centered on the complexity of graph problems in the
well-studied LOCAL model of distributed computing, introduced by Linial [FOCS
'87]. It is widely known that for many of the classic distributed graph
problems (including maximal independent set (MIS) and -vertex
coloring), the randomized complexity is at most polylogarithmic in the size
of the network, while the best deterministic complexity is typically
. Understanding and narrowing down this exponential gap
is considered to be one of the central long-standing open questions in the area
of distributed graph algorithms. We investigate the problem by introducing a
complexity-theoretic framework that allows us to shed some light on the role of
randomness in the LOCAL model. We define the SLOCAL model as a sequential
version of the LOCAL model. Our framework allows us to prove completeness
results with respect to the class of problems which can be solved efficiently
in the SLOCAL model, implying that if any of the complete problems can be
solved deterministically in rounds in the LOCAL model, we can
deterministically solve all efficient SLOCAL-problems (including MIS and
-coloring) in rounds in the LOCAL model. We show
that a rather rudimentary looking graph coloring problem is complete in the
above sense: Color the nodes of a graph with colors red and blue such that each
node of sufficiently large polylogarithmic degree has at least one neighbor of
each color. The problem admits a trivial zero-round randomized solution. The
result can be viewed as showing that the only obstacle to getting efficient
determinstic algorithms in the LOCAL model is an efficient algorithm to
approximately round fractional values into integer values