Demystifying the Mathematics of Erasure Coding

With cost and performance requirements becoming more and more relevant in today’s storage products, technologies that leverage algorithmic driven improvements are getting a lot of attention. Erasure coding is the most prominent algorithm and a meanwhile well established standard for saving on-disk space requirements in storage. It is built upon mathematical techniques. In my talk I want to explain and explore these techniques, and thereby the mathematical reasoning underlying these algorithms in a way that does not require a background in mathematics itself (or at least only an insignificant amount). I am not a software engineer myself, just an interested mathematics student who aims to introduce someone who is interested and not too fond of maths to the underlying theory of erasure coding.