Autonomic ComputingIvo Neskovic

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It all started in 1876...

• Alexander Graham Bell

• Inventor of the telephone

• One of the most influential inventions ever

• Widely adopted

• By 1886 nearly 150.000 Americans had telephones in their homes

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The Telephony Crisis of 1920

• Manual telephone switchboards

• By the year of 1980, every woman in the U.S. would have to work as a switchboard operator

• The Solution: Automatic Branch Exchanges

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Flash Forward to 2001

• The 'telephone' is the computer

• The 'telephone network' is the Internet

• The 'telephone operators' are system administrators

• Predictions are that by the year 2010, 200 million workers will have to maintain trillion systems

• We need to invent the 'automatic branch exchanges' of the 21st century

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IBM's Vision

• Paul Horn, Senior Vice President of Research

• Creator of the term 'autonomic computing'

• Systems need to develop 'self-managing' capabilities

• System administrators will no longer be needed for maintaining computer systems

• Author of the Autonomic Computing Manifesto

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Outline

• The Solution

• What is Autonomic Computing?

• Designing Autonomic Computer Systems

• Eight Principles of Autonomic Computing

• The Benefits• Short-term IT related benefits

• Long-term, Higher Order Benefits

• Research Projects

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The Solution

• End users of computer systems are the primary stakeholders

• They desire:• Intuitive interaction with the system

• Their involvement in the smooth running of the system to be minimal to none

• Conclusion: the system has to be autonomic

• The only know truly autonomic system is the human central nervous system

• Sends control messages to the organs in the human body at a sub-concious level

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Central Nervous System

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What is Autonomic Computing?

• A network of autonomic, smart computing components which provide the user with the desired functionality without a concious effort

• A new computing paradigm, transferring the focus from computing to data

• Key concept: Allow users to access data from multiple distributed points, with great transparency to how this is achieved

• Focus in IT industry must change from increasing processing speed and storage capacity to developing large distributed, self-managing, self-diagnostic networks

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Designing Autonomic Computer Systems

• Change in design, implementation and support is imminent

• Three basic principles:• Flexible. Data transfer through a

platform/hardware independent approach

• Accessible. The system must be always accessible; always 'on'

• Transparent. The system will function and adapt to the users needs without any human involvement

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Eight Principles of Autonomic Computing

• An autonomic computing system needs to ”know itself” - its components must also possess a system identity

• An autonomic computing system must configure and reconfigure itself under varying and unpredictable conditions

• An autonomic computing system never settles for the status quo - it always looks for ways to optimize its workings

• An autonomic computing system must perform something akin to healing - it must be able to recover from routine and extraordinary events that might cause some of its parts to malfunction

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Eight Principles of Autonomic Computing (Cont.)

• An autonomic computing system must detect, identify and protect itself against various types of attacks to maintain overall system security and integrity

• An autonomic computing system must know its environment and the context surrounding its activity, and act accordingly

• An autonomic computing system cannot exist in a hermetic environment

• An autonomic computing system will anticipate the optimized resources needed while keeping its complexity hidden

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The Benefits

• Short-Term IT Related Benefits• Simplified user experience through a more

responsive, real-time system.

• Cost-savings – scale to use.

• Scaled power, storage and costs that optimize usage across both hardware and software.

• Full use of idle processing power, including home PC's, through networked systems.

• Natural language queries allow deeper and more accurate returns.

• Seamless access to multiple file types. Open standards will allow users to pull data from all potential sources by re-formatting on the fly.

• Stability. High availability. High security system. Fewer system or network errors due to self-healing.

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The Benefits (Cont.)

• Long-Term, Higher Order Benefits• Realize the vision of enablement by shifting

available resources to higher-order business.

• Embedding autonomic capabilities in client or access devices, servers, storage systems, middle-ware and network itself.

• Constructing autonomic federated systems.

• Achieving end-to-end service level management.

• Collaboration and global problem-solving.

• Massive simulation – weather, medical – complex calculations like protein folding.

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Research Projects

• Berkeley University of California: Recovery-Oriented Computing• Joint Berkeley/Stanford project.

• Investigating novel techniques for building highly-dependable Internet services.

• Emphasizes recovery from failures rather than failure-avoidance.

• Carnegie Mellon University: Self-Securing Storage & Devices• Enabling the storage device to safeguard data

even when the client OS is compromised.

• Server-embedded security that cannot be disabled by any software (event the OS).

• Self-securing storage server actively looks for suspicious behaviour.

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Research Projects (Cont.)

• Georgia Institute of Technology: Qfabric• Closely integrating applications and resource

managers in the Quality of Service management.

• Achieved by tying applications and resource managers through the same event-based control path.

• Application and resource managers can interact freely to ensure optimal resource scheduling and adaptations.

• NASA: Autonomous Nanotechnology Swarm (ANTS)• 1,000 pico-class spacecraft.

• Each spacecraft caries only one instrument.

• Swarm will be self-protecting, self-healing, self-configuring and self-optimizing.

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Summary

• Inspired by biology.

• Evolved as a discipline to create software systems and applications that self-manage.

• Main purpose is to overcome the complexities and inability to maintain current and emerging systems effectively.

• IT industry, software engineering and development must change the current focus and the process for developing autonomic systems.

• Still in the early research-only phases, with hindsight of 'real' projects forming in the near future.

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Bibliography

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S. Ahmed, S.I. Ahamed, M. Sharmin, and M.M. Haque, "Self-healing for autonomic pervasive computing," Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied computing - SAC '07, 2007, p. 110.

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J. Cheng, W. Cheng, and R. Nagpal, "Robust and self-repairing formation control for swarms of mobile agents," Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, CA; Cambridge, MA; London; AAAI Press; MIT Press; 1999, 2005, p. 59.

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S. Dobson, R. Sterritt, P. Nixon, and M. Hinchey, "Fulfilling the Vision of Autonomic Computing," IEEE Computer, vol. 43, 2010, p. 35–41.

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E. Mainsah, "Autonomic computing: the next era of computing," Electronics and Communication Engineering, 2002, pp. 8-9.

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B. Melcher and B. Mitchell, "Towards an autonomic framework: Self-configuring network services and developing autonomic applications," Intel Technology Journal, vol. 8, 2004, p. 279–290.

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Bibliography (Cont.)

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A. Garcia, T. Batista, A. Rashid, and C. Sant'Anna, "Autonomic computing: emerging trends and open problems," SIGSOFT Softw Eng Notes, vol. 30, 2005, pp. 1-7.

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P. Horn, "Autonomic Computing: IBM's Perspective on the State of Information Technology," Computing Systems, 2002.

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M.C. Huebscher and J.A. McCann, "A survey of autonomic computing—degrees, models, and applications," ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), vol. 40, 2008.

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IBM, "White Paper: An architectural blueprint for autonomic computing," white paper, 2005.

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J. Kephart, "Research challenges of autonomic computing," Proceedings. 27th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2005. ICSE 2005., 2005, pp. 15-22.

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J. Kephart and D. Chess, "The vision of autonomic computing," Computer, 2003, pp. 41-50.