Projects outside IBM

Work contributing to the creation of autonomic computing systems reaches beyond IBM's laboratories. The links below highlight projects underway at universities contributing to autonomic computing or related fields. As the I/T community begins to redefine its goals to meet the needs of our changing world, this list will grow.

If we should be linking to your work, send us a note with a link to your project information and a brief description of what you're doing. Send this information to webmaster@watson.ibm.com .

Berkeley University of California: OceanStore
OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers. Any computer can join the infrastructure -- users need only subscribe to a single OceanStore service provider, although they may consume storage and bandwidth from many different providers.
Contact: John Kubiatowicz is a researcher at Berkeley exploring the space of Introspective Computing, namely systems which perform continuous, on-line adaptation. Applications include on-chip tolerance of flaky components and continuous optimization to adapt to server failures and denial of service attacks.

Berkeley OceanStore homepage

Berkeley University of California: Recovery-Oriented Computing
The Recovery-Oriented Computing (ROC) project is a joint Berkeley/Stanford research project that is investigating novel techniques for building highly-dependable Internet services. ROC emphasized recovery from failures rather than failure-avoidance. This philosophy is motivated by the observation that even the most robust systems still occasionally encounter failures due to human operator error, transient or permanent hardware failure, and software anomalies resulting from software aging.
Contact: David Patterson is a Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley working on the ROC project.

Berkeley ROC project page

Carnegie Mellon University: Self-securing Storage & Devices
Self-securing storage is an exciting new technology for enhancing intrusion survival by enabling the storage device to safeguard data even when the client OS is compromised. It capitalizes on the fact that storage servers (whether file servers, disk array controllers, or even IDE disks) run separate software on separate hardware. This opens the door to server-embedded security that cannot be disabled by any software (even the OS) running on client systems as shown in the figure above. Of course, such servers have a narrow view of system activity, so they cannot distinguish legitimate users from clever impostors. But, from behind the thin storage interface, a self-securing storage server can actively look for suspicious behavior, retain an audit log of all storage requests, and prevent both destruction and undetectable tampering of stored data. The latter goals are achieved by retaining all versions of all data; instead of over-writing old data when a write command is issued, the storage server simply creates a new version and keeps both. Together with the audit log, the server-retained versions represent a complete history of system activity from the storage systems point of view.
Contact: Gregory Ganger is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Self-securing Storage and Self-securing Devices

Columbia University: Autonomizing Legacy Systems
Autonomic computing self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing applications, systems and networks is widely believed to be a promising solution to ever-increasing system complexity and the spiraling costs of human system management as systems scale to global proportions. Most results to date, however, suggest ways to architect new software constructed from the ground up as autonomic systems, whereas in the real world organizations continue to use stovepipe legacy systems and/or build systems of systems that draw from a gamut of new and legacy components involving disparate technologies from numerous vendors. The goal of this project is to retrofit autonomic computing onto such systems, externally, without any need to understand or modify the code, and in many cases even when it is impossible to recompile. The project presents a meta-architecture implemented as active middleware infrastructure to explicitly add autonomic services via an attached feedback loop that provides continual monitoring and, as needed, reconfiguration and/or repair. The lightweight design and separation of concerns enables easy adoption of individual components, as well as the full infrastructure, for use with a large variety of legacy, new systems, and systems of systems.
Contact: Gail Kaiser is a Professor and the Director of the Programming Systems Lab in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University.

Autonomizing Legacy Systems

Cornell University: Astrolabe
The dramatic growth of computer networks creates both an opportunity and a daunting distributed computing problem for users seeking to build applications that can configure themselves and adapt as disruptions occur. The problem is that data often resides on large numbers of devices and evolves rapidly. Systems that collect data at a single location scale poorly and suffer from single-point failures. Astrolabe is a new system to automate self-configuration, monitoring, and to control adaptation. Astrolabe operates by creating a virtual system-wide hierarchical database, which evolves as the underlying information changes. Astrolabe is secure, robust under a wide range of failure and attack scenarios, and imposes low loads even under stress.
Contact: Kenneth Birman is a Professor in Computer Science at Cornell University working on Astrolabe.

Astrolabe

Georgia Institute of Technology: Qfabric
Distributed applications require end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) management to ensure that (a) such applications achieve their goals in regard to functionality and performance and (b) system resources (processors, networks, disks, memory, etc.) are shared in a manner that prevents applications from interfering with each other. QoS-awareness of applications is an approach to allow them to take part in a resource management. This happens through interfaces that allow applications to specify their desired QoS or monitor the achieved QoS. Our approach is to closely integrate applications and resource managers in the QoS management. This is achieved by tying applications and resource managers through the same event-based control path. In other words, any control information exchanged between applications via the control path can be monitored by the underlying resource management. On the other hand, all resource management activities can be monitored by the application. Further, application and resource managers can interact freely to ensure optimal resource scheduling and adaptations.
Contact: Karsten Schwan is a Professor and the director of the Systems Research Group in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Qfabric