Coded Parallel Transmission for Half-Duplex Distributed Computing

Abstract

This work studies a general distributed coded computing system based on the MapReduce-type framework, where distributed computing nodes within a half-duplex network wish to compute multiple output functions. We first introduce a definition of communication delay to characterize the time cost during the date shuffle phase, and then propose a novel coding strategy that enables parallel transmission among the computation nodes by delicately designing the data placement, message symbols encoding, data shuffling, and decoding. Compared to the coded distributed computing (CDC) scheme proposed by Li et al., the proposed scheme significantly reduces the communication delay, in particular when the computation load is relatively smaller than the number of computing nodes K. Moreover, the communication delay of CDC is a monotonically increasing function of K, while the communication delay of our scheme decreases as K increases, indicating that the proposed scheme can make better use of the computing resources.