The Dance Party Problem and its Application to Collective Communication in Computer Networks

Motivated by implementing collective communication operations on a network of processors connected via ethernet and similar bus lines, a problem of scheduling a dance party is formulated. The problem is solved by two algorithms based on searching and divide-and-conquer that generate suboptimal schedules and an algorithm based on graph factorization that generates optimal schedules. It is shown how to use dance schedules to implement collective communication operations such as all-gather. ∗email address: [email protected], fax: (213) 749-8489.