  We propose a unified coded framework for distributed computing with
straggling servers, by introducing a tradeoff between "latency of computation"
and "load of communication" for some linear computation tasks. We show that the
coded scheme of [1]-[3] that repeats the intermediate computations to create
coded multicasting opportunities to reduce communication load, and the coded
scheme of [4], [5] that generates redundant intermediate computations to combat
against straggling servers can be viewed as special instances of the proposed
framework, by considering two extremes of this tradeoff: minimizing either the
load of communication or the latency of computation individually. Furthermore,
the latency-load tradeoff achieved by the proposed coded framework allows to
systematically operate at any point on that tradeoff to perform distributed
computing tasks. We also prove an information-theoretic lower bound on the
latency-load tradeoff, which is shown to be within a constant multiplicative
gap from the achieved tradeoff at the two end points.
