We study a Faulty Congested Clique model, in which an adversary may fail nodes in the network throughout the computation. We show that any task of O(nlogn)-bit input per node can be solved in roughly n rounds, where n is the size of the network. This nearly matches the linear upper bound on the complexity of the non-faulty Congested Clique model for such problems, by learning the entire input, and it holds in the faulty model even with a linear number of faults. Our main contribution is that we establish that one can do much better by looking more closely at the computation. Given a deterministic algorithm A for the non-faulty Congested Clique model, we show how to transform it into an algorithm A′ for the faulty model, with an overhead that could be as small as some logarithmic-in-n factor, by considering refined complexity measures of A. As an exemplifying application of our approach, we show that the O(n1/3)-round complexity of semi-ring matrix multiplication [Censor-Hillel, Kaski, Korhonen, Lenzen, Paz, Suomela, PODC 2015] remains the same up to polylog factors in the faulty model, even if the adversary can fail 99% of the nodes (or any other constant fraction).
@article{arxiv.2505.11430,
title = {Computing in a Faulty Congested Clique},
author = {Keren Censor-Hillel and Pedro Soto},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11430},
year = {2025}
}