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."

Comments

It doens't matter

[Kipsaysso]

It won't matter until it can fix user errors anyway.

Re:Self-fixing computer?

[EmagGeek]

That's scary to me... I don't want to find out that the only reason people are friends with me is because I can fix their computer... I have a feeling I would find that out pretty quickly heh

autonomic computing: an old hat

[geg81]

People have been trying to make systems easier to manage for years. Unfortunately, it's not enough to have the desire to make systems self-managing, you also need good ideas for how to do it, and those are still lacking as much as they always have been.

Give the guy credit, though, for seeing a good opportunity. Industry will believe in this silver bullet like they have done in the ones before.

Unfortunately, the real research will still take decades to complete, and then this area will have a bad name just like most of the other overhyped technologies before it.

Change how you view yourself and your job...

[Lodragandraoidh]

I have been talking about this for years...

If the autonomous systems NASA and the ESA have put into the void are any indication, I don't think we have much to worry about - the costs will be prohibitive for all save the largest organizations, and true autonomy (in the form of robotics) will have a whole range of other problems (imagine your main file server getting up and walking out of the data center because it mistakenly assumed there was a fire...)

The key, in the interrum is make yourself indispensible. If you have the mindset that you are a code grinder/monkey and that is all you want to be, then your days are numbered. Your goal should instead be becoming the guy who can put together a complete solution (data, application, hardware, network) in short order that works, scales well, and is extensible by your users. You need to be a jack-of-all-trades. That is how to survive and gain esteem in the eyes of your clients and peers, as I see it.

CISCO's CSR-1 already does this

[flyingrobots]

I wouldn't consider this to be new...rather it's the idea of this that is starting to propigate.

CISCO's new 92 terabit/sec router already has some of these features. The OS they used to build the system supports many of these features (high availability, self healing, etc).

http://www.qnx.com/markets/networking_telecom/cisc o/

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/index.h tml

It's a self healing system. It uses the services and functionality of the OS to accomplish it.

QNX's networking system is really neat because it allows processes to be independent of where they actually run on a network. And the network can be anything (i.e. a backplane, Ethernet, whatever). So it lends itself to solving such a problem.

The 4 Rs, matey

[tootlemonde]

The IBM links says, under "The Solution":

Autonomic computing: a systemic view of computing modeled after a self-regulating biological system.

In conventional system design, the Rs of reliable systems are: (1) Robust, (2) Repair, and (3) Redundant.

• Robust means the system is less likely to fail.
• Repair means a secondary system looks for signs of failure in the primary system and repairs the problem.
  
• Redundant means a secondary system takes over when the primary system fails.

Biological systems use all three methods to varying degrees but the problem is that biological systems do not survive as individuals, they survive as a species by tolerating a high degree of failure and using a fourth R: Replication.

For computer systems, this biological systems approach would mean replacing every component of the system on a regular basis the way all the cells in the human body are completely replaced every seven years. Periodically, you would throw out the entire system and replace it with two or three new ones that have undergone a period of testing and development.

The replication approach, which is key to the survival of biological systems, runs counter to most business thinking, which is to replace multiple systems with fewer, more powerful systems. This limits reliability to the first three Rs.

There is much that can be done to increase reliability with these 3 Rs but if biological systems are any indication (as well as some theoretical limits), they are inadequate.

The problem of reliability could ultimately be a flaw in the way business works rather than a technical problem.