Hierarchical Group Testing for Byzantine Attack Identification in Distributed Matrix Multiplication

Abstract

Coded computing has proved its efficiency in handling a straggler issue in distributed computing framework. It uses error correcting codes to mitigate the effect of the stragglers. However, in a coded distributed computing framework, there may exist Byzantine workers who send the wrong computation results to a master in order to contaminate the overall computation output. Therefore, it is essential to identify Byzantine workers from their computation results in coded computing. In this paper, we consider Byzantine attack identification problem in coded computing for distributed matrix multiplication tasks. We propose a new coding scheme which facilitates the efficient Byzantine attack identification, namely locally testable codes. We also suggest a hierarchical group testing method for Byzantine attack identification. We claim the required number of tests for group testing in our scheme, and show that it requires smaller number of tests than the conventional group testing method for the existing coded computing schemes.