Kishori Konwar: FLECKS-Fast Lean Erasure-coded Consistent Key-value Store

Creating highly-available and cost-effective large-scale distributed object storage systems with useful consistency guarantees is at the heart of enabling the implementation of many Internet-based applications. While traditional systems employ replication of data across servers to guarantee availability and fault-tolerance, erasure code-based object stores have recently gained interest due to their ability to substantially reduce storage and bandwidth costs. 
In this work, we design FLECKS - a novel erasure-code based atomic object algorithm for message passing environment.  FLECKS supports multiple writers and multiple readers and has a tunable level of fault-tolerance and provably correct guarantees of strong consistency and wait-freedom for read and write operations. 
Moreover, FLECKS operations are single rounds are single-round when there is little or no concurrency.   We also implement and test FLECKS under a client-server model over an asynchronous network, and compare with a quorum based replicated system. Our experiments show that FLECKS not only confirms to the design goals of achieving substantially lower storage and bandwidth costs compared to replication, but also offers greatly improved client-operation latencies for a variety of read-write workloads, object sizes, and server-failure conditions.