The round complexity of distributed sorting
Boaz Patt-Shamir, Marat Teplitsky · 2011
We consider the model of fully connected networks, where in each round each node can send an O(log n)-bit message to each other node (this is the CONGEST model with diameter 1). It is known that in this model, min-weight spanning trees can be found in O(log log n) rounds. In this paper we show that distributed sorting, where each node has at most n items, can be done in time O(log log n) as well. It is also shown that selection can be done in O(1) time. (Using a concurrent result by Lenzen and Wattenhofer, the complexity of sorting is further reduced to constant.) Our algorithms are randomized, and the stated complexity bounds hold with high probability.