Barg Awarded $300K NSF Grant to Research Data Storage and Recovery Methodologies

Professor Alexander Barg (ECE/ISR) is the principal investigator for a new NSF grant, Efficient Codes and their Performance Limits for Distributed Storage Systems. The three-year, $300K grant will fund research to address efficient and secure methodologies to store and recover the mass amounts of data generated in every day computational practices. This research will contribute to the development of more efficient data management procedures in large-scale distributed storage systems, like Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID).

Due to the increase in computational devices and tasks that occur every day, large data centers and distributed storage systems have become more widespread. While a data center should never lose data, industry statistics confirm daily disk failures. Barg will develop methodologies and error correcting codes to enable systems to provide safeguards against data loss and reduce the amount of data that needs to be moved in order to enable recovery of information lost due to disk failures. This research will also focus on the reduction of storage overhead needed to support the recovery procedures.

Barg plans to accomplish these improvements by relying on new algebraic methods of constructing the data encoding procedures as well as on novel algorithms of data exchange and recovery which will enable tradeoff between overhead and repair bandwidth based on the concept of local recovery.

The project will also address the problem of simultaneous recovery of data from multiple locations, enhancing data availability in large-scale distributed storage systems which are a key backbone component of the 21st century economy.

Published October 6, 2014