We demonstrate a coded computing framework, named Coded Distributed Computing (CDC), which optimally trades extra computation resources for communication bandwidth in a MapReduce-type distributed computing environment. We also empirically illustrate the practical impact of CDC by analyzing the performance of a distributed sorting algorithm, named CodedTeraSort, which was developed by integrating the coding principle of CDC into the Hadoop benchmark TeraSort. Experiment results illustrate 1.97x - 3.39x speedup using CodedTeraSort, compared with TeraSort, for typical settings of interest. Furthermore, we also demonstrate how applying the CDC scheme to a mobile distributed computing platform can lead to a scalable design that accommodates any number of mobile users.