Vers: fully distributed Coded Computing System with Distributed Encoding

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully distributed coded computing system suitable for emerging decentralized technologies, addressing challenges posed by adversarial data owners and establishing the fundamental limits of reliable computation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel distributed encoding scheme without a central encoder, handling adversarial owners, and characterizes the system's fundamental limit for correct computation.

Findings

System achieves reliable distributed computation with adversarial owners.

Fundamental limit of correct computation is characterized as t* = v^β d (K-1) + 1.

Introduces tag functions for data owner and worker coordination.

Abstract

Coded computing has proved to be useful in distributed computing. We have observed that almost all coded computing systems studied so far consider a setup of one master and some workers. However, recently emerging technologies such as blockchain, internet of things, and federated learning introduce new requirements for coded computing systems. In these systems, data is generated in a distributed manner, so central encoding/decoding by a master is not feasible and scalable. This paper presents a fully distributed coded computing system that consists of $k\in\mathbb{N}$ data owners and $N\in\mathbb{N}$ workers, where data owners employ workers to do some computations on their data, as specified by a target function $f$ of degree $d\in\mathbb{N}$. As there is no central encoder, workers perform encoding themselves, prior to computation phase. The challenge in this system is the presence of adversarial data owners that do not know the data of honest data owners but cause discrepancies by sending different data to different workers, which is detrimental to local encodings in workers. There are at most $\beta\in\mathbb{N}$ adversarial data owners, and each sends at most $v\in\mathbb{N}$ different versions of data. Since the adversaries and their possibly colluded behavior are not known to workers and honest data owners, workers compute tags of their received data, in addition to their main computational task, and send them to data owners to help them in decoding. We introduce a tag function that allows data owners to partition workers into sets that previously had received the same data from all data owners. Then, we characterize the fundamental limit of the system, $t^*$, which is the minimum number of workers whose work can be used to correctly calculate the desired function of data of honest data owners. We show that $t^*=v^{\beta}d(K-1)+1$, and present converse and achievable proofs.