Toward Optimal Bounds in the Congested Clique

We study two fundamental graph problems, Graph Connectivity (GC) and Minimum Spanning Tree (MST), in the well-studied Congested Clique model, and present several new bounds on the time and message complexities of randomized algorithms for these problems. No non-trivial (i.e., super-constant) time lower bounds are known for either of the aforementioned problems; in particular, an important open question is whether or not constant-round algorithms exist for these problems. We make progress toward answering this question by presenting randomized Monte Carlo algorithms for both problems that run in O(log log log n) rounds (where n is the size of the clique). Our results improve by an exponential factor on the long-standing (deterministic) time bound of O(log log n) rounds for these problems due to Lotker et al. (SICOMP 2005). Our algorithms make use of several algorithmic tools including graph sketching, random sampling, and fast sorting.