Autonomic Computing

pvcpie writes: "The New York Times has a story today about Autonomic Computing, which is described as "a biological metaphor suggesting a systemic approach to attaining a higher level of automation in computing;" and they published a paper (pdf) on the topic. Apparently there are already some universities signed up on Autonomic Computing projects, more info was available on the website and in the nyt article. It also appeared in CNET."

Comments

The future

[micromoog]

This is absolutely the future of commercial computing. Each new release of each major vendor's flagship database product is increasingly self-tuning, and these systems generally run better than their manually-tuned predecessors (due in part to the shortage of skilled workers).

The more that can be done automatically, the more of the IT staff's precious time can be dedicated to more complex tuning tasks, and/or new development. This will make IT more effective, not obsolete.

Repackaging the future

[nyjx]

Just to be cynical for once - this sounds like a "user centric" repackaging of a whole bunch of hard AI research: learning, reactive planning, goal driven behaviour and autonomous agent work in particular.

In the end it turns out that the most complex problem arise in trying to coordinate a collection of "autonomic" (?) components. Distributed systems with unrully objects... This is what the autonomous agent community is mainly concerned with ( see the UMBC agents page or this very useful overview paper for example).

Of course IBM pushing this it might mean a kick up rear for the academic to actually get some of this potentially cool stuff working. Chances are you never want the end user to know how it works anyway.