  Inspired by social networks and complex systems, we propose a core-periphery
network architecture that supports fast computation for many distributed
algorithms and is robust and efficient in number of links. Rather than
providing a concrete network model, we take an axiom-based design approach. We
provide three intuitive (and independent) algorithmic axioms and prove that any
network that satisfies all axioms enjoys an efficient algorithm for a range of
tasks (e.g., MST, sparse matrix multiplication, etc.). We also show the
minimality of our axiom set: for networks that satisfy any subset of the
axioms, the same efficiency cannot be guaranteed for any deterministic
algorithm.
