In one embodiment, a device receives information regarding a data set to be processed by a map-reduce process. The device generates a set of virtual clusters for the map-reduce process based on network bandwidths between nodes of the virtual clusters, each node of the virtual cluster corresponding to a resource device, and associates the data set with a map-reduce process task. The device then schedules the execution of the task by a node of the virtual clusters based on the network bandwidth between the node and a source node on which the data set resides.