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

Networks Cannot Compute Their Diameter in Sublinear Time

We study the problem of computing the diameter of a network in a distributed way. The model of distributed computation we consider is: in each synchronous round, each node can transmit a different (but short) message to each of its neighbors. We provide an ˜ Ω(n) lower bound for the number of communication rounds needed, where n denotes the number of nodes in the network. This lower bound is valid even if the diameter of the network is a small constant. We also show that a (3/2 − ε)-approximation of the diameter requires ˜ Ω ( √ n + D) rounds. Furthermore we use our new technique to prove an ˜ Ω ( √ n + D) lower bound on approximating the girth of a graph by a factor 2 − ε.