Vero Estrada-Galiñanes: Entanglement codes | Swarm Orange Summit Madrid 2019

Wed, Oct 2, 2019, 12:00 AM

The BBChain project aims at providing permanent availability to authenticated documents such degree certificates. Swarm offers a peer-to-peer storage solution with features that seem to be well-aligned with the storage requirements of BBChain. The design of a decentralised system that guarantees long-term storage includes monetary incentives, some type of storage verification and a robust mechanism to increase the chances to recover files from unreliable nodes. P2P storage solutions require much more redundancy (and high fault-tolerance) than the usual redundancy used in centralised systems. In this talk, I will focused on redundancy mechanisms to tolerate failures and in particular on alpha entanglement codes. Alpha entanglement codes are a mechanism to propagate redundant information across a large scale distributed system and create a virtual storage layer of highly interconnected elements. These codes have a strong positive impact on data durability due to their ability to repair efficiently single and catastrophic failures. Unlike other codes, entanglements take advantage of the combinatorial effect while being less dependent on the availability of nodes in a distributed systems. Classical coding is more efficient than replication due to the combinatorial effect. However, in peer-to-peer systems, the negative effects of poor peer availability affects classical coding since the repair process depends on the availability of multiple locations. Alpha entanglements are less affected by the peer availability effect since only two blocks are used for repairs and they benefit from the combinatorial effect too due to the redundancy propagation. About Vero Dr. Vero Estrada-Galiñanes is a Postdoc, member of the Resilient system Lab at the University of Stavanger. She collaborates with Prof. Hein Meling and his team in the project BBChain: Efficient Trustworthy Computing with Blockchains and Biometrics, funded by the Research Council of Norway. Vero’s research interests include storage, security and distributed systems. She holds a PhD from University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. Her thesis on entanglement codes have attracted the interest of the academia and the industry. Overall, her research received support from the Argentinean National Scientific Technical Research Council, SNSF, ACM, Google, Usenix, ANU, NICTA and Max Planck Institute. She holds a Master degree in Applied Computer Science from University of Tokyo and an Electronic Engineer Diploma from University of Buenos Aires. Before she started building a scientific career, she worked several years in the private and public sector.