Revisiting Bruck: Phase-Efficient All-to-All Collective Communication in Reconfigurable Networks

All-to-All collective communication is a key performance bottleneck for distributed machine learning (ML) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, where dense traffic increasingly stresses scale-up interconnects. While these ML and HPC workloads have driven unprecedented infrastructure demand, optical reconfigurable networks (ORNs) offer a promising path forward as they can reconfigure the network at runtime. By adapting the physical topology to the active workload, they improve communication cost and bandwidth utilization. However, optical reconfigurable networks introduce a fundamental trade-off for collective communication: each reconfiguration requires global synchronization, during which communication is suspended for at a non-negligible delay. Additionally, their benefit is critically contingent on whether the collective consists of structured phases that can be served by sparse and reusable topology states.