The Dijkstra–Scholten algorithm (named after Edsger W. Dijkstra and Carel S. Scholten) is an algorithm for detecting termination in a distributed system.
[3] First, consider the case of a simple process graph which is a tree.
Such a process graph may arise when the computation is strictly a divide-and-conquer type.
A node starts the computation and divides the problem in two (or more usually, a multiple of 2) roughly equal parts and distribute those parts to other processors.
This process continues recursively until the problems are of sufficiently small size to solve in a single processor.