Consider a network of agents connected by communication links, where each
agent holds a real value. The gossip problem consists in estimating the average
of the values diffused in the network in a distributed manner. We develop a
method solving the gossip problem that depends only on the spectral dimension
of the network, that is, in the communication network set-up, the dimension of
the space in which the agents live. This contrasts with previous work that
required the spectral gap of the network as a parameter, or suffered from slow
mixing. Our method shows an important improvement over existing algorithms in
the non-asymptotic regime, i.e., when the values are far from being fully mixed
in the network. Our approach stems from a polynomial-based point of view on
gossip algorithms, as well as an approximation of the spectral measure of the
graphs with a Jacobi measure. We show the power of the approach with
simulations on various graphs, and with performance guarantees on graphs of
known spectral dimension, such as grids and random percolation bonds. An
extension of this work to distributed Laplacian solvers is discussed. As a side
result, we also use the polynomial-based point of view to show the convergence
of the message passing algorithm for gossip of Moallemi \& Van Roy on regular
graphs. The explicit computation of the rate of the convergence shows that
message passing has a slow rate of convergence on graphs with small spectral
gap