Autonomic Computing: An Overview
Manish Parashar1 and Salim Hariri2
The Applied Software Systems Laboratory, Rutgers University, Piscataway NJ, USA 2 High Performance Distributed Computing Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA parashar@caip.rutgers.edu, hariri@ece.arizona.edu
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Abstract. The increasing scale complexity, heterogeneity and dynamism of networks, systems and applications have made our computational and information infrastructure brittle, unmanageable and insecure. This has necessitated the investigation of an alternate paradigm for system and application design, which is based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with similar challenges – a vision that has been referred to as autonomic computing. The overarching goal of autonomic computing is to realize computer and software systems and applications that can manage themselves in accordance with high-level guidance from humans. Meeting the grand challenges of autonomic computing requires scientific and technological advances in a wide variety of fields, as well as new software and system architectures that support the effective integration of the constituent technologies. This paper presents an introduction to autonomic computing, its challenges, and opportunities.

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Introduction

Advances in networking and computing technology and software tools have resulted in an explosive growth in networked applications and information services that cover all aspects of our life. These sophisticated applications and services are extremely complex, heterogeneous and dynamic. Further, the underlying information infrastructure (e.g., the Internet) globally aggregates large numbers of independent computing and communication resources, data stores and sensor networks, and is itself similarly large, heterogeneous, dynamic and complex. The combination has resulted in application