Coding for Information Storage
Storage systems are widely used and have played a crucial rule in both consumer and industrial products, for example, personal computers, data centers, and embedded systems. However, such system suffers from issues of cost, restricted-lifetime, and reliability with the emergence of new systems and devices. Information theory, on the other hand, provides fundamental bounds and solutions to fully utilize resources such as data density, information I/O and network bandwidth. This talk tries to bridge these two topics, and proposes to solve challenges in data storage using a variety of coding techniques, so that storage becomes faster, more affordable, and more reliable.
We consider the device level and study partial rank modulation for flash memory. Rank modulation is a novel data representation scheme proposed by Jiang et al. for multi-level ﬂash memory cells, in which a set of n cells stores information in the permutation induced by the different charge levels of the individual cells. It eliminates the need for discrete cell levels, as well as overshoot errors, when programming cells. In order to decrease the decoding complexity, we propose partial rank modulation, where only part of the n cells are used to represent data. We present Gray codes spanning all possible partial-rank states and using only “push-to-the-top” operations.
We consider the system level and study the integration of RAID schemes and distributed storage. Erasure-correcting codes are the basis of the ubiquitous RAID schemes for storage systems, where disks correspond to symbols in the code. Specifically, RAID schemes are based on MDS (maximum distance separable) array codes that enable optimal storage and efficient encoding and decoding algorithms. With r redundancy symbols an MDS code can sustain r erasures. For example, consider an MDS code that can correct two erasures. It is clear that when two symbols are erased, one needs to access and transmit all the remaining information to rebuild the erasures. However, an interesting and practical question is: What is the smallest fraction of information that one needs to access and transmit in order to correct a single erasure? In this talk we will show that the lower bound of 1/2 is achievable and that the result can be generalized to codes with arbitrary number of parities and optimal rebuilding.