Autonomic Computing Workshop 

Abstract: Autonomic computing - self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing applications, systems and networks - is widely believed to be a promising solution to ever-increasing system complexity and the spiraling costs of human system management as systems scale to global proportions. Most results to date, however, suggest ways to architect new software constructed from the ground up as autonomic systems, whereas in the real world organizations continue to use stovepipe legacy systems and/or build ''systems of systems'' that draw from a gamut of new and legacy components involving disparate technologies from numerous vendors. Our goal is to retrofit autonomic computing onto such systems, externally, without any need to understand or modify the code, and in many cases even when it is impossible to recompile. We present a meta-architecture implemented as active middleware infrastructure to explicitly add autonomic services via an attached feedback loop that provides continual monitoring and, as needed, reconfiguration and/or repair. Our lightweight design and separation of concerns enables easy adoption of individual components, as well as the full infrastructure, for use with a large variety of legacy, new systems, and systems of systems. We summarize several experiments spanning multiple domains.

Abstract: This paper proposes a mobile-agent-based middleware that benefits remote computer users who wish to mutually offer their desktop computing resource to other Internet group members while their computers are not being used. Key to this resource exchange grid is the use of mobile agents. Each agent represents a client user, carries his/her job requests, searches for resources available for the request, executes the job at suitable computers, and migrates it to others when the current ones have become unavailable for use. All the features of job migration will be encapsulated in a user program wrapper that is implemented on Java layer between a mobile agent and the corresponding user program. The wrapper maintains the complete execution state of the user program, is carried by the mobile agent upon a job migration, and restores its user program its destination. For this purpose, a user program is preprocessed with JavaCC and ANTLR to include check-pointing functions before its execution. These functions periodically save the execution state of a user program into its corresponding program wrapper, which can thus be carried by an agent smoothly.

Abstract: This paper attempts to identify one of the necessary conditions for self-healing, or self-repair, in complex systems, and to propose means for satisfying this condition in heterogeneous distributed software. The condition identified here is the following: For a system with a wide and open range of possible configurations to be self healing, it must possess suitable regularities, which can be relied upon to be satisfied by all possible configurations of the system, and which must be invariant of its failures. We observe that self-healing in physical artifacts, as well as in biological systems, are largely based on regularities engendered by the laws of nature. But since laws of nature have no effective sway over the behavior of software, we propose means for imposing artificial laws over a given distributed system, which are designed to induce desired regularities in them. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach by applying it to a simple example of electronic purchasing in enterprise systems.

Abstract: SHARK is a novel concept and middleware service for search in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Rather than flooding a network like Gnutella or imposing numerical IDs on objects like distributed hash tables, it is based on directed routing of keywords in a multidimensional redundant metadata hierarchy. SHARK arranges nodes and objects in the network and in semantic clusters. In spite of its rich keyword search capabilities, it achieves a high degree of scalability, outperforming random networks by several orders of magnitude. It can easily be adopted for applications as diverse as file sharing, P2P trading, or distributed expert and knowledge market places.