Distributed Computing with Heterogeneous Communication Constraints: The Worst-Case Computation Load and Proof by Contradiction

Abstract: We consider a distributed computing framework where the distributed nodes have different communication capabilities, motivated by the heterogeneous networks in data centers and mobile edge computing systems. Following the structure of MapReduce, this framework consists of Map computation phase, Shuffle phase, and Reduce computation phase. The Shuffle phase allows distributed nodes to exchange intermediate values, in the presence of heterogeneous communication bottlenecks for different nodes (heterogeneous communication load constraints). For this setting, we characterize the minimum total computation load and the minimum worst-case computation load in some cases, under the heterogeneous communication load constraints. While the total computation load depends on the sum of the computation loads of all the nodes, the worst-case computation load depends on the computation load of a node with the heaviest job. We show an interesting insight that, for some cases, there is a tradeoff between the minimum total computation load and the minimum worst-case computation load, in the sense that both cannot be achieved at the same time. The achievability schemes are proposed with careful design on the file assignment and the data shuffling. Beyond the cut-set bound, a novel converse is proposed using the proof by contradiction. For the general case, we identify two extreme regimes in which both the scheme with coding and the scheme without coding are optimal, respectively.