Computing in a Faulty Congested Clique

Abstract

We study a Faulty Congested Clique model, in which an adversary may fail nodes in the network throughout the computation. We show that any task of $O(n\log n)$-bit input per node can be solved in roughly $n$ rounds, where $n$ is the size of the network. This nearly matches the linear upper bound on the complexity of the non-faulty Congested Clique model for such problems, by learning the entire input, and it holds in the faulty model even with a linear number of faults. Our main contribution is that we establish that one can do much better by looking more closely at the computation. Given a deterministic algorithm $\mathcal{A}$ for the non-faulty Congested Clique model, we show how to transform it into an algorithm ${\mathcal{A}}^{\prime }$ for the faulty model, with an overhead that could be as small as some logarithmic-in-$n$ factor, by considering refined complexity measures of $\mathcal{A}$. As an exemplifying application of our approach, we show that the $O(n^{1/3})$-round complexity of semi-ring matrix multiplication [Censor-Hillel, Kaski, Korhonen, Lenzen, Paz, Suomela, PODC 2015] remains the same up to polylog factors in the faulty model, even if the adversary can fail $99\%$ of the nodes (or any other constant fraction).