Presenter(s)
ISIT 2024 Plenary Lecture
Abstract
Error control coding is essential in many scientific disciplines and nearly all telecommunication systems. Proposals for new codes and new roles of codes in communications and computing systems continue to appear. Each new proposal initially faces (justified) skepticism and pushback by practitioners until discarded or adopted as a necessary evil. Coding performance metrics have become hard to define and even harder to evaluate. The first part of this talk considers the service rate region of a code, a new performance metric of a distributed system that stores data redundantly using the code. It measures the storage system's ability to serve multiple users requesting different data objects. The second part of the talk asks if there is a coding gain in adding redundancy to distributed computing and how we can evaluate and achieve it.