A Fundamental Tradeoff Between Computation and Communication in Distributed Computing

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information theory Vol. 64; no. 1; pp. 109 - 128
• Main Authors: Songze Li, Maddah-Ali, Mohammad Ali, Qian Yu, Avestimehr, A. Salman
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Benchmark testing; coded multicasting; coded TeraSort; Coding; Communication; Computation; computation-communication tradeoff; Computer networks; Distributed computing; Distributed databases; Distributed processing; Electrical engineering; Electronic mail; Encoding; Information theory; Load distribution (forces); Lower bounds; MapReduce; Nodes; Optimization; Stress concentration; Tradeoffs
• ISSN: 0018-9448; 1557-9654
• DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2017.2756959

How can we optimally trade extra computing power to reduce the communication load in distributed computing? We answer this question by characterizing a fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing, i.e., the two are inversely proportional to each other. More sp...