Speaker: Roberto Assis Machado

Title: More Servers, Less Total Communication for Secure Distributed Matrix Multiplication

Abstract: In this presentation, we continue the discussion about the problem of communication efficient, secure distributed matrix multiplication. The previous literature has focused on reducing the number of servers as a proxy for minimizing communication costs. The intuition is that the more servers used to perform the task, the higher is the communication cost. We will present that this does not happen in general. The primary technique relies on adapting results from the literature on repairing Reed-Solomon codes. This new approach permits the user to download partial outputs of a computing task, obtained by field traces of it. We present a construction for Field Trace Polynomial (FTP) codes, a family of codes, that leverage this technique and characterize regimes for which they outperform any traditional type polynomial codes.