On single-port multinode broadcasting

The advent of distributed-memory multiprocessors has spawned an increasing amount of research in information dissemination problems. Given a network of processors (or nodes) where some of them own pieces of information, the problem is to spread the information to a group of recipients using the links of the network. The term 'collective communications' has been coined to signify the fact that such problems involve more than two nodes. Multinode broadcasting, an important collective communication problem, involves simultaneous broadcastings from all the nodes in a network. We present algorithms for the minimum-time solution of the problem in packet-switched networks that follow the single-port model. In particular, we construct a general algorithm for the solution of the problem in arbitrary multidimensional networks and provide conditions that ensure its optimality.