A 2-Approximation Algorithm for Data-Distributed Metric k-Center

Abstract: In a metric space, a set of point sets of roughly the same size and an integer $k\geq 1$ are given as the input and the goal of data-distributed $k$-center is to find a subset of size $k$ of the input points as the set of centers to minimize the maximum distance from the input points to their closest centers. Metric $k$-center is known to be NP-hard which carries to the data-distributed setting. We give a $2$-approximation algorithm of $k$-center for sublinear $k$ in the data-distributed setting, which is tight. This algorithm works in several models, including the massively parallel computation model (MPC).