Network Decomposition and Distributed Derandomization

Abstract

This keynote talk will provide an overview of a recent line of work [Rozhoň and Ghaffari at STOC 2020; Ghaffari, Harris, and Kuhn at FOCS 2018; and Ghaffari, Kuhn, and Maus at STOC 2017], which presented the first efficient deterministic network decomposition algorithm as well as a general derandomization result for distributed graph algorithms. Informally, the derandomization result shows that any (locally-checkable) graph problem that admits an efficient randomized distributed algorithm also admits an efficient deterministic distributed algorithm. These results resolve several central and decades-old open problems in distributed graph algorithms.