Autonomic computing: An overview

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.

A Multicast Transport Protocol for Reliable Group Applications

This paper presents a transport-level multicast protocol that is useful for building fault-tolerant group-based applications. It provides (i) reliable, end-to-end message delivery, and (ii) a failure supector service wherein best efforts are made to avoid mistakes. This service facilitates an efficient, higher level implementation of group membership service which does not capriciously exclude a functioning and connected member from the membership set. The protocol has mechanisms for flow- and implosion-control, and for recovering from packet losses. Through simulations, its performance is studied for both homogeneous and heterogeneous network configurations. The results are very encouraging

Multifaceted Simultaneous Load Balancing in DHT-based P2P systems: A new game with old balls and bins

In this paper we present and evaluate uncoordinated on-line algorithms for simultaneous storage and replication load-balancing in DHT-based peer-to-peer systems. We compare our approach with the classical balls into bins model, and point out the similarities but also the differences which call for new loadbalancing mechanisms specifically targeted at P2P systems. Some of the peculiarities of P2P systems, which make our problem even more challenging are that both the network membership and the data indexed in the network is dynamic, there is neither global coordination nor global information to rely on, and the load-balancing mechanism ideally should not compromise the structural properties and thus the search efficiency of the DHT, while preserving the semantic information of the data (e.g., lexicographic ordering to enable range searches)