Super-fast MST Algorithms in the Congested Clique using $o(m)$ Messages

In a sequence of recent results (PODC 2015 and PODC 2016), the running time of the fastest algorithm for the \emph{minimum spanning tree (MST)} problem in the \emph{Congested Clique} model was first improved to $O(\log \log \log n)$ from $O(\log \log n)$ (Hegeman et al., PODC 2015) and then to $O(\log^* n)$ (Ghaffari and Parter, PODC 2016). All of these algorithms use $\Theta(n^2)$ messages independent of the number of edges in the input graph. This paper positively answers a question raised in Hegeman et al., and presents the first "super-fast" MST algorithm with $o(m)$ message complexity for input graphs with $m$ edges. Specifically, we present an algorithm running in $O(\log^* n)$ rounds, with message complexity $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{m \cdot n})$ and then build on this algorithm to derive a family of algorithms, containing for any $\varepsilon$, $0 < \varepsilon \le 1$, an algorithm running in $O(\log^* n/\varepsilon)$ rounds, using $\tilde{O}(n^{1 + \varepsilon}/\varepsilon)$ messages. Setting $\varepsilon = \log\log n/\log n$ leads to the first sub-logarithmic round Congested Clique MST algorithm that uses only $\tilde{O}(n)$ messages. Our primary tools in achieving these results are (i) a component-wise bound on the number of candidates for MST edges, extending the sampling lemma of Karger, Klein, and Tarjan (Karger, Klein, and Tarjan, JACM 1995) and (ii) $\Theta(\log n)$-wise-independent linear graph sketches (Cormode and Firmani, Dist.~Par.~Databases, 2014) for generating MST candidate edges.