Several years ago, in Dell's partnership with the Blocklab project at UC San Diego, we hypothesized that a distributed ledger can be a useful way to track analytic operations in a federated environment.
We subsequently designed a test system that could record federated learning and analytics operations in a distributed environment, and set out to build an example of this test system at UCSD.
The results of our experiment were recently published in Frontiers for Blockchain.
Our system created an API using the Boomi product. The choice of an API abstracted away the distributed ledger implementation choice. For our experiment, the Boomi layer interacted with VMware's blockchain. See the figure below.
The team followed a six step process while building the test system:
With this approach the team has created a tamper-proof ledger that can track the completion of analytic tasks across a federated ecosystem.
The paper goes on to conclude that "FL/FA blockchain will continue to gain traction in a range of industry use cases and in interdisciplinary academic research (Li et al., 2021; Salim et al., 2021; Unal et al., 2021)."
Steve
Dell Technologies Fellow
http://stevetodd.typepad.com