  Coding for distributed computing supports low-latency computation by
relieving the burden of straggling workers. While most existing works assume a
simple master-worker model, we consider a hierarchical computational structure
consisting of groups of workers, motivated by the need to reflect the
architectures of real-world distributed computing systems. In this work, we
propose a hierarchical coding scheme for this model, as well as analyze its
decoding cost and expected computation time. Specifically, we first provide
upper and lower bounds on the expected computing time of the proposed scheme.
We also show that our scheme enables efficient parallel decoding, thus reducing
decoding costs by orders of magnitude over non-hierarchical schemes. When
considering both decoding cost and computing time, the proposed hierarchical
coding is shown to outperform existing schemes in many practical scenarios.
