a technique for organizing a plurality of computers such that message broadcast , content searching , and computer identification of the entire collection or a subset of the entire collection may be performed quickly without the use of a controlling computer . the technique describes the creation , operation , and maintenance of a connection scheme by which each computer in the collection appears to be the top level of a hierarchical array . the maintenance of this hierarchical connection scheme allows one to many communications throughout the collection of computers to scale geometrically rather than linearly .