Vinodh Venkatesan

Biography

Vinodh Venkatesan received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from IIT Madras in 2006 and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and information technology from ETH Zurich, in 2008. Since 2008, he has been a pre-doc in the Storage Systems Group at IBM Research in Zurich while working toward a Ph.D. degree at EPFL, under Prof. Rudiger Urbanke and Prof. Christina Fragouli. He is a recipient of the Best Paper Award in MASCOTS 2011 conference for his paper on the reliability of storage systems. His research interests include reliability, data storage systems, network coding, and information theory.

Current Work

- Mathematical modeling of failures and repairs of nodes in a large-scale data storage system to be able to estimate how long the system can be kept going until some data is permanently lost due to a catastrophic sequence of node failures.
- Exploring different ways data could be placed across nodes in a redundant manner so that repairs can be made faster and the system becomes more reliable.
- Understanding the effects of the distributions of the lifetimes of nodes and node repairs on the reliability of the system.