Section: Scientific Foundations

Autonomic Computing

During the past years the development of raw computing power coupled with the proliferation of computer devices has grown at exponential rates. This phenomenal growth along with the advent of the Internet have led to a new age of accessibility - to other people, other applications and others systems. It is not just a matter of numbers. This boom has also led to unprecedented levels of complexity for the design and the implementation of these applications and systems, and of the way they work together. The increasing system scale is reaching a level beyond human ability to master its complexity.

This points towards an inevitable need to automate many of the functions associated with computing today. Indeed we want to interact with applications and systems intuitively, and we want to be far less involved in running them. Ideally, we would like computing systems to entirely manage themselves.

IBM [68] has named its vision for the future of computing "autonomic computing." According to IBM this new computer paradigm means the design and implementation of computer systems, software, storage and support that must exhibit the following basic fundamentals:

Flexibility.

An autonomic computing system must configure and reconfigure itself under varying, even unpredictable, conditions.

Accessibility.

The nature of the autonomic system is that it is always on.

Transparency.

The system will perform its tasks and adapt to a user's needs without dragging the user into the intricacies of its workings.

In the Myriads team we will act to satisfy these fundamentals.