Message Optimality and Message-Time Trade-offs for APSP and Beyond

Dufoulon, Fabien and Pai, Shreyas and Pandurangan, Gopal and Pemmaraju, Sriram and Robinson, Peter (2025) Message Optimality and Message-Time Trade-offs for APSP and Beyond. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) :. ACM, New York, 299–309. ISBN 9798400718854

Abstract

Round complexity is an extensively studied metric of distributed algorithms. In contrast, our knowledge of the message complexity of distributed computing problems and its relationship (if any) with round complexity is still quite limited. To illustrate, for many fundamental distributed graph optimization problems such as (exact) diameter computation, All-Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP), Maximum Matching etc., while (near) round-optimal algorithms are known, message-optimal algorithms are hitherto unknown. More importantly, the existing round-optimal algorithms are not message-optimal. This raises two important questions: (1) Can we design message-optimal algorithms for these problems? (2) Can we give message-time tradeoffs for these problems in case the message-optimal algorithms are not round-optimal? In this work, we focus on a fundamental graph optimization problem, All Pairs Shortest Path (APSP), whose message complexity is still unresolved. We present two main results: (1) An algorithm that solves weighted APSP, using Õ(n2) messages in Õ(n2) rounds. This algorithm is message-optimal (up to logarithmic factors) for algorithms that take poly(n) rounds. (2) For any 0 ≤ ϵ ≤ 1, we show how to solve unweighted APSP in Õ(n2–ϵ) rounds and Õ(n2+ϵ) messages. At one end of this smooth trade-off, we obtain a (nearly) message-optimal algorithm (for algorithms that take poly(n) rounds) using Õ(n2) messages (for ϵ = 0), whereas at the other end we get a (nearly) round-optimal algorithm using Õ(n) rounds (for ϵ = 1).