A collective communication apparatus and method for parallel computing systems. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises a plurality of processor elements (PEs); collective interconnect logic to dynamically form a virtual collective interconnect (VCI) between the PEs at runtime without global communication among all of the PEs, the VCI defining a logical topology between the PEs in which each PE is directly communicatively coupled to a only a subset of the remaining PEs; and execution logic to execute collective operations across the PEs, wherein one or more of the PEs receive first results from a first portion of the subset of the remaining PEs, perform a portion of the collective operations, and provide second results to a second portion of the subset of the remaining PEs.