Coded distributed computing for sparse functions with structured support

Coded distributed computing (CDC), originally proposed by Li et al., leverages coded multicast messages to exchange computed intermediate values among the distributed computing nodes, such that the overall communication load could be reduced by a factor of r, the number of input files assigned to each node. However, in the original CDC framework, each output function/task is composed of intermediate values from all input files. In this paper, we propose a new CDC problem for sparse functions with structured support, where each output function depends on a subset of the input files. For a symmetric structured support for which the input files are divided into G equal-length batches and each output function depends on the same number of G ′ batches, we propose a novel CDC scheme that is strictly better by a factor G/G ′ than directly employing the original CDC scheme in the considered problem. Furthermore, by proposing a new converse bound, we prove that the communication load of the proposed CDC scheme is order optimal within a constant multiplicative factor of 6.