13,346 research outputs found
General-purpose autonomic computing
The success of mainstream computing is largely due to the widespread availability of general-purpose architectures and of generic approaches that can be used to solve real-world problems cost-effectively and across a broad range of application domains. In this chapter, we propose that a similar generic framework is used to make the development of autonomic solutions cost effective, and to establish autonomic computing as a major approach to managing the complexity of todayâs large-scale systems and systems of systems. To demonstrate the feasibility of general-purpose autonomic computing, we introduce a generic autonomic computing framework comprising a policy-based autonomic architecture and a novel four-step method for the effective development of self-managing systems. A prototype implementation of the reconfigurable policy engine at the core of our architecture is then used to develop autonomic solutions for case studies from several application domains. Looking into the future, we describe a methodology for the engineering of self-managing systems that extends and generalises our autonomic computing framework further
Reconfigurable service-oriented architecture for autonomic computing
Almost a decade has passed since the objectives and benefits of autonomic computing were stated, yet even the latest system designs and deployments exhibit only limited and isolated elements of autonomic functionality. In previous work, we identified several of the key challenges behind this delay in the adoption of autonomic solutions, and proposed a generic framework for the development of autonomic computing systems that overcomes these challenges. In this article, we describe how existing technologies and standards can be used to realise our autonomic computing framework, and present its implementation as a service-oriented architecture. We show how this implementation employs a combination of automated code generation, model-based and object-oriented development techniques to ensure that the framework can be used to add autonomic capabilities to systems whose characteristics are unknown until runtime. We then use our framework to develop two autonomic solutions for the allocation of server capacity to services of different priorities and variable workloads, thus illustrating its application in the context of a typical data-centre resource management problem
A peer-to-peer infrastructure for resilient web services
This work is funded by GR/M78403 âSupporting Internet Computation in Arbitrary Geographical Locationsâ and GR/R51872 âReflective Application Framework for Distributed Architecturesâ, and by Nuffield Grant URB/01597/G âPeer-to-Peer Infrastructure for Autonomic Storage ArchitecturesâThis paper describes an infrastructure for the deployment and use of Web Services that are resilient to the failure of the nodes that host those services. The infrastructure presents a single interface that provides mechanisms for users to publish services and to find hosted services. The infrastructure supports the autonomic deployment of services and the brokerage of hosts on which services may be deployed. Once deployed, services are autonomically managed in a number of aspects including load balancing, availability, failure detection and recovery, and lifetime management. Services are published and deployed with associated metadata describing the service type. This same metadata may be used subsequently by interested parties to discover services. The infrastructure uses peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay technologies to abstract over the underlying network to deploy and locate instances of those services. It takes advantage of the P2P network to replicate directory services used to locate service instances (for using a service), Service Hosts (for deployment of services) and Autonomic Managers which manage the deployed services. The P2P overlay network is itself constructed using novel Web Services-based middleware and a variation of the Chord P2P protocol, which is self-managing.Postprin
A Generic Storage API
We present a generic API suitable for provision of highly generic storage
facilities that can be tailored to produce various individually customised
storage infrastructures. The paper identifies a candidate set of minimal
storage system building blocks, which are sufficiently simple to avoid
encapsulating policy where it cannot be customised by applications, and
composable to build highly flexible storage architectures. Four main generic
components are defined: the store, the namer, the caster and the interpreter.
It is hypothesised that these are sufficiently general that they could act as
building blocks for any information storage and retrieval system. The essential
characteristics of each are defined by an interface, which may be implemented
by multiple implementing classes.Comment: Submitted to ACSC 200
A Framework for Agile Development of Component-Based Applications
Agile development processes and component-based software architectures are
two software engineering approaches that contribute to enable the rapid
building and evolution of applications. Nevertheless, few approaches have
proposed a framework to combine agile and component-based development, allowing
an application to be tested throughout the entire development cycle. To address
this problematic, we have built CALICO, a model-based framework that allows
applications to be safely developed in an iterative and incremental manner. The
CALICO approach relies on the synchronization of a model view, which specifies
the application properties, and a runtime view, which contains the application
in its execution context. Tests on the application specifications that require
values only known at runtime, are automatically integrated by CALICO into the
running application, and the captured needed values are reified at execution
time to resume the tests and inform the architect of potential problems. Any
modification at the model level that does not introduce new errors is
automatically propagated to the running system, allowing the safe evolution of
the application. In this paper, we illustrate the CALICO development process
with a concrete example and provide information on the current implementation
of our framework
Modelling and analyzing adaptive self-assembling strategies with Maude
Building adaptive systems with predictable emergent behavior is a challenging task and it is becoming a critical need. The research community has accepted the challenge by introducing approaches of various nature: from software architectures, to programming paradigms, to analysis techniques. We recently proposed a conceptual framework for adaptation centered around the role of control data. In this paper we show that it can be naturally realized in a reflective logical language like Maude by using the Reflective Russian Dolls model. Moreover, we exploit this model to specify, validate and analyse a prominent example of adaptive system: robot swarms equipped with self-assembly strategies. The analysis exploits the statistical model checker PVeStA
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