Broadcasting on the star and pancake interconnection networks

Broadcasting is an important data communication operation in a parallel computer. In this paper, we first give a short survey on various broadcasting schemes on the star and pancake interconnection networks. We then present a broadcasting algorithm on the star and pancake networks, which can broadcast m messages of fixed length on an n-star or n-pancake in time O(n log n+m), improving the previous best result O(m log n log n). Our result is optimal in view of the Ω(n log n+m) lower bound for the problem. Moreover our algorithm works for both the star and pancake networks, while the previous O(m log n+n log n) algorithm is only for the star