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.

Re:Hmmm...

[saridder]

A program/database is only only as good as the knowledge of the person who has input and wrote it. If a PC thinks that to wipe it's hard drive is the best way to fix itself, I'd blame the author who wrote the maintenance program. No expert would wipe a hard drive as a general fix for a PC, and would not write these instructions into the PC.

In my opinion, part of a autonomous PC is to be self-sufficient, not act like a lemming and follow other PC's just to follow.

Plus, just as human have a basic survial instinct to survive, I think you'd write this instinct into the PC as well and not have it destroy itself (unless it was doing major harm to its master, etc. Remember Asimov's rules for robots).

Finally, I agree humans will never be replaced as the final decision maker in fixing and running PC's, servers, networks, etc., but when I was a sys admin, I'd have killed for PC's to be smart enough to do some of the basic, mundane, man-hour, labourious tasks such as upgrading Service Packs if I told them all to do it, install programs, etc. Then I could have done more fun stuff. Plus when I had to fix a problem, people weren't glad to see me, because I was only there when something went wrong. Granted they were happy someone was there to fix the problem, but all would have preferred that there was no problem in the first place (PC fixed itself).