The Influence of Placement on Transmission in Distributed Computing of Boolean Functions

Abstract

In this paper, we explore a distributed setting, where a user seeks to compute a linearly-separable Boolean function of degree $M$ from $N$ servers, each with a cache size $M$. Exploiting the fundamental concepts of sensitivity and influences of Boolean functions, we devise a novel approach to capture the interplay between dataset placement across servers and server transmissions and to determine the optimal solution for dataset placement that minimizes the communication cost. In particular, we showcase the achievability of the minimum average joint sensitivity, $\frac{N}{2^{M-1}}$, as a measure for the communication cost.