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