Locality and Availability in Distributed Storage

This paper studies the problem of code symbol availability: a code symbol is said to have $(r, t)$-availability if it can be reconstructed from $t$ disjoint groups of other symbols, each of size at most $r$. For example, $3$-replication supports $(1, 2)$-availability as each symbol can be read from its $t= 2$ other (disjoint) replicas, i.e., $r=1$. However, the rate of replication must vanish like $\frac{1}{t+1}$ as the availability increases. This paper shows that it is possible to construct codes that can support a scaling number of parallel reads while keeping the rate to be an arbitrarily high constant. It further shows that this is possible with the minimum distance arbitrarily close to the Singleton bound. This paper also presents a bound demonstrating a trade-off between minimum distance, availability and locality. Our codes match the aforementioned bound and their construction relies on combinatorial objects called resolvable designs. From a practical standpoint, our codes seem useful for distributed storage applications involving hot data, i.e., the information which is frequently accessed by multiple processes in parallel.Comment: Submitted to ISIT 201

Coding for the Clouds: Coding Techniques for Enabling Security, Locality, and Availability in Distributed Storage Systems

Cloud systems have become the backbone of many applications such as multimedia streaming, e-commerce, and cluster computing. At the foundation of any cloud architecture lies a large-scale, distributed, data storage system. To accommodate the massive amount of data being stored on the cloud, these distributed storage systems (DSS) have been scaled to contain hundreds to thousands of nodes that are connected through a networking infrastructure. Such data-centers are usually built out of commodity components, which make failures the norm rather than the exception. In order to combat node failures, data is typically stored in a redundant fashion. Due to the exponential data growth rate, many DSS are beginning to resort to error control coding over conventional replication methods, as coding offers high storage space efficiency. This paradigm shift from replication to coding, along with the need to guarantee reliability, efficiency, and security in DSS, has created a new set of challenges and opportunities, opening up a new area of research. This thesis addresses several of these challenges and opportunities by broadly making the following contributions. (i) We design practically amenable, low-complexity coding schemes that guarantee security of cloud systems, ensure quick recovery from failures, and provide high availability for retrieving partial information; and (ii) We analyze fundamental performance limits and optimal trade-offs between the key performance metrics of these coding schemes. More specifically, we first consider the problem of achieving information-theoretic security in DSS against an eavesdropper that can observe a limited number of nodes. We present a framework that enables design of secure repair-efficient codes through a joint construction of inner and outer codes. Then, we consider a practically appealing notion of weakly secure coding, and construct coset codes that can weakly secure a wide class of regenerating codes that reduce the amount of data downloaded during node repair. Second, we consider the problem of meeting repair locality constraints, which specify the number of nodes participating in the repair process. We propose a notion of unequal locality, which enables different locality values for different nodes, ensuring quick recovery for nodes storing important data. We establish tight upper bounds on the minimum distance of linear codes with unequal locality, and present optimal code constructions. Next, we extend the notion of locality from the Hamming metric to the rank and subspace metrics, with the goal of designing codes for efficient data recovery from special types of correlated failures in DSS.We construct a family of locally recoverable rank-metric codes with optimal data recovery properties. Finally, we consider the problem of providing high availability, which is ensured by enabling node repair from multiple disjoint subsets of nodes of small size. We study codes with availability from a queuing-theoretical perspective by analyzing the average time necessary to download a block of data under the Poisson request arrival model when each node takes a random amount of time to fetch its contents. We compare the delay performance of the availability codes with several alternatives such as conventional erasure codes and replication schemes

Coding for the Clouds: Coding Techniques for Enabling Security, Locality, and Availability in Distributed Storage Systems

Cloud systems have become the backbone of many applications such as multimedia streaming, e-commerce, and cluster computing. At the foundation of any cloud architecture lies a large-scale, distributed, data storage system. To accommodate the massive amount of data being stored on the cloud, these distributed storage systems (DSS) have been scaled to contain hundreds to thousands of nodes that are connected through a networking infrastructure. Such data-centers are usually built out of commodity components, which make failures the norm rather than the exception. In order to combat node failures, data is typically stored in a redundant fashion. Due to the exponential data growth rate, many DSS are beginning to resort to error control coding over conventional replication methods, as coding offers high storage space efficiency. This paradigm shift from replication to coding, along with the need to guarantee reliability, efficiency, and security in DSS, has created a new set of challenges and opportunities, opening up a new area of research. This thesis addresses several of these challenges and opportunities by broadly making the following contributions. (i) We design practically amenable, low-complexity coding schemes that guarantee security of cloud systems, ensure quick recovery from failures, and provide high availability for retrieving partial information; and (ii) We analyze fundamental performance limits and optimal trade-offs between the key performance metrics of these coding schemes. More specifically, we first consider the problem of achieving information-theoretic security in DSS against an eavesdropper that can observe a limited number of nodes. We present a framework that enables design of secure repair-efficient codes through a joint construction of inner and outer codes. Then, we consider a practically appealing notion of weakly secure coding, and construct coset codes that can weakly secure a wide class of regenerating codes that reduce the amount of data downloaded during node repair. Second, we consider the problem of meeting repair locality constraints, which specify the number of nodes participating in the repair process. We propose a notion of unequal locality, which enables different locality values for different nodes, ensuring quick recovery for nodes storing important data. We establish tight upper bounds on the minimum distance of linear codes with unequal locality, and present optimal code constructions. Next, we extend the notion of locality from the Hamming metric to the rank and subspace metrics, with the goal of designing codes for efficient data recovery from special types of correlated failures in DSS.We construct a family of locally recoverable rank-metric codes with optimal data recovery properties. Finally, we consider the problem of providing high availability, which is ensured by enabling node repair from multiple disjoint subsets of nodes of small size. We study codes with availability from a queuing-theoretical perspective by analyzing the average time necessary to download a block of data under the Poisson request arrival model when each node takes a random amount of time to fetch its contents. We compare the delay performance of the availability codes with several alternatives such as conventional erasure codes and replication schemes

Capacity of Locally Recoverable Codes

Motivated by applications in distributed storage, the notion of a locally recoverable code (LRC) was introduced a few years back. In an LRC, any coordinate of a codeword is recoverable by accessing only a small number of other coordinates. While different properties of LRCs have been well-studied, their performance on channels with random erasures or errors has been mostly unexplored. In this note, we analyze the performance of LRCs over such stochastic channels. In particular, for input-symmetric discrete memoryless channels, we give a tight characterization of the gap to Shannon capacity when LRCs are used over the channel.Comment: Invited paper to the Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 201

Optimal Linear and Cyclic Locally Repairable Codes over Small Fields

We consider locally repairable codes over small fields and propose constructions of optimal cyclic and linear codes in terms of the dimension for a given distance and length. Four new constructions of optimal linear codes over small fields with locality properties are developed. The first two approaches give binary cyclic codes with locality two. While the first construction has availability one, the second binary code is characterized by multiple available repair sets based on a binary Simplex code. The third approach extends the first one to q-ary cyclic codes including (binary) extension fields, where the locality property is determined by the properties of a shortened first-order Reed-Muller code. Non-cyclic optimal binary linear codes with locality greater than two are obtained by the fourth construction.Comment: IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2015, Apr 2015, Jerusalem, Israe

Constructions of Batch Codes via Finite Geometry

A primitive $k$-batch code encodes a string $x$ of length $n$ into string $y$ of length $N$, such that each multiset of $k$ symbols from $x$ has $k$ mutually disjoint recovering sets from $y$. We develop new explicit and random coding constructions of linear primitive batch codes based on finite geometry. In some parameter regimes, our proposed codes have lower redundancy than previously known batch codes.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

Optimal Binary Locally Repairable Codes via Anticodes

This paper presents a construction for several families of optimal binary locally repairable codes (LRCs) with small locality (2 and 3). This construction is based on various anticodes. It provides binary LRCs which attain the Cadambe-Mazumdar bound. Moreover, most of these codes are optimal with respect to the Griesmer bound