EE Special Seminar
Abstract: Modern data storage and computing systems are typically distributed, with the various distributed components sharing the communication resources of the system. In this talk, I will describe techniques for efficient utilization of communication and storage resources for such systems, presenting results from an information theoretic perspective. The talk contains two main parts.
The first part of the talk presents principles and applications of interference alignment - a technique to manage interference in distributed communication systems. In particular, I will discuss the idea of alignment, its promise in resolving interference bottlenecks in wireless communication systems, and its potential role in enabling efficient data access in fault tolerant storage systems. I will present related challenges and opportunities, particularly focusing on theoretical aspects of interference alignment.
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss an application of erasure coding to distributed computing in the context of emulating a memory that is shared by multiple processors. In addition to fault tolerance, a critical requirement for such systems is the following property often known as consistency: when the value stored is being updated often, a client attempting to read the data should get the latest version of the data. I will present the ideas behind a new erasure coding based algorithm that emulates a consistent shared memory over a distributed storage system, and discuss its communication and storage costs.
Bio: Dr. Viveck Cadambe is a postdoctoral associate at the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India in 2006. His research interests include information and coding theory, wireless communication networks, and distributed storage and computing.
Dr. Cadambe is a recipient of the 2009 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. He also received the EECS Department Best Paper Award for 2008-09 and the 2011 CPCC Best Dissertation Award at the University of California, Irvine. He interned at the Communications, Collaboration and Systems Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond WA in 2010.