The online bisection problem requires maintaining a dynamic partition of $n$ nodes into two equal-sized clusters. Requests arrive sequentially as node pairs. If the nodes lie in different clusters, the algorithm pays unit cost. After each request, the algorithm may migrate nodes between clusters at unit cost per node. This problem models datacenter resource allocation where virtual machines must be assigned to servers, balancing communication costs against migration overhead.
We study the variant where requests are restricted to edges of a ring network, an abstraction of ring-allreduce patterns in distributed machine learning. Despite this restriction, the problem remains challenging with an $Ω(n)$ deterministic lower bound. We present a randomized algorithm achieving $O(\varepsilon^{-3} \cdot \log^2 n)$ competitive ratio using resource augmentation that allows clusters of size at most $(3/4 + \varepsilon) \cdot n$.
Our approach formulates the problem as a metrical task system with a restricted state space. By limiting the number of cut-edges (i.e., ring edges between clusters) to at most $2k$, where $k = Θ(1/\varepsilon)$, we reduce the state space from exponential to polynomial (i.e., $n^{O(k)}$). The key technical contribution is proving that this restriction increases cost by only a factor of $O(k)$. Our algorithm follows by applying the randomized MTS solution of Bubeck et al. [SODA 2019].
The best result to date for bisection with ring demands is the $O(n \cdot \log n)$-competitive deterministic online algorithm of Rajaraman and Wasim [ESA 2024] for the general setting. While prior work for ring-demands by Räcke et al. [SPAA 2023] achieved $O(\log^3 n)$ for multiple clusters, their approach employs a resource augmentation factor of $2+\varepsilon$, making it inapplicable to bisection.
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Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
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Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院）；Graduate School of Business and Data Science Institute, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学商学院与数据科学研究所）
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Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院电气工程与计算机科学系）；Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学工业工程与决策分析系）
