Initiative for Autonomic Computing Gains Strength

museumpeace writes "Tired of fixing your computer? What if your system broke down two billion miles from the nearest spare part or human? NASA has just held a colloquium where Ulster University computer science researcher Roy Sterritt was invited to present his ideas on Autonomic Computing. In the last few years,the leading system vendors have realized 'There is no less than a crisis today in three areas: cost, availability and user experience.' There has been a fair amount of academic research since customers like NASA see in it the potential to make remotely operated complex systems sustainable. It all makes for some very cool systems design work and there are lots of further research opportunities. Just don't forget what it may do to your job."

Google could use this

[mogrify]

In the ZDNet article [zdnet.com.au] on Google's inner workings that was posted earlier on /., Urs Hölzle mentions that in the larger Google clusters, 2 machines per day will fail. They compensate for this with triple redundancy, good software for failover control, and a staff of 800(!) computer scientists. Needless to say, not everyone could manage this... there's definitely an enterprise niche for system autonomy. This also brings IBM's eFuse technology [theregister.co.uk] for self-repairing chips to mind.

Already being done (to an extent)

[Iphtashu Fitz]

For years SAN's from EMC, fault tolerant serves from Stratus, etc. have all had the ability to phone home when they detect a failure is imminent or has occured. Usually the customer doesn't realize there's even a problem until a service tech shows up with replacement parts.

Of course getting this down to the level of home users is still a long way away...

Re:Self-fixing computer?

[adeydas]

Self-fixing computers means some form of Artificial Intelligence, which again means smarter computers in the sense that it can do more logical operations rather than crunch numbers and data only. May be it won't be much of an impact on computers with personal and business uses but in the science arena, it might bring about a revolution. Just imagine producing complex models in bio-chemistry or designing a chip would be so very much easier with a machine to fix stuff whenever the need be.

Autonmic Computing: Another Near Impact Object

[Ted Holmes]

Autonomic computing means a computing system which is self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting.

As we modelled the eye to build cameras, the brain to build computers, the ear to build speakers, we're modeling our autonomic nervous system to build the next evolutionary step in computing. Networks that independently and reflexively self -regulate, configure, repair, optimize, and protect in the same sense as an immune system or an automatic pilot.

This would allow the network to automatically manage server load balancing, process allocation, monitor the power supply, automatic update software and fend off threats without having to consult the administrator.

For example, if an application starts performing badly, it automatically receives increased resources. If software or hardware fails, it doesn't even ripple the end users coffee. An autonomous computing system would roll out new patches, monitor and adjust the resources singular end users need, set up servers... all the mundane stuff.

The complexity of integrating and managing the latest hardware and software into existing systems is destroying the advantages of economies of scale. Autonomic computing is one way of insulating the IT administrator from the mundane complexities and freeing them to do other more interesting things like understanding the needs of the business more, or modelling and automating existing business processes.

On a larger scale, it spells an evolutionary move towards a decentralized global self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting nervous system. Since Autonomic Computing can look for patterns in data and extrapolate to predict future events, deployed on a global scale, the spin-offs would be very interesting.
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