  The critical group of an abelian network is a finite abelian group that
governs the behavior of the network on large inputs. It generalizes the
sandpile group of a graph. We show that the critical group of an irreducible
abelian network acts freely and transitively on recurrent states of the
network. We exhibit the critical group as a quotient of a free abelian group by
a subgroup containing the image of the Laplacian, with equality in the case
that the network is rectangular. We generalize Dhar's burning algorithm to
abelian networks, and estimate the running time of an abelian network on an
arbitrary input up to a constant additive error.
