Abstract
In a keynote address to the National Academy of Engineers at Harvard University in October 2001, IBM’s senior vice president of research Paul Horn stated:
“... we face a problem springing from the very core of our success ⎯ and too few of us are focused on solving it. More than any other I/T problem, this one ⎯ if it remains unsolved ⎯ will actually prevent us from moving to the next era of computing. The obstacle is complexity ... Dealing with it is the single most important challenge facing the I/T industry.”
Widespread industry recognition of this challenge is exemplified by initiatives by major players like HP (Adaptive Enterprise), IBM (Autonomic Computing), Intel (Proactive Computing), Microsoft (Dynamic Systems Initiative), and Sun (N1).
As part of its response to this challenge, IBM has developed an Autonomic Computing research program that has, in the 2 ½ years since Paul Horn’s address, grown to encompass well over 100 researchers working on dozens of projects taking place in over half a dozen research labs around the world. From the beginning, customer scenarios have been invaluable in driving individual autonomic computing research projects and maintaining coherency across them.
We begin the tutorial by presenting a set of industry scenarios that illustrate the complexities inherent in managing today’s I/T systems and motivate the need to make them more self-managing. Following an overview of IBM’s Autonomic Computing Research program, we introduce you to several of IBM’s leading researchers, who will give you a deeper look inside their individual projects in areas ranging from self-optimization to self-healing to self-configuration to human-computer interaction, several of them relying on tools and techniques from artificial intelligence and mathematics. We describe a publicly available toolkit from which you may construct autonomic components, and show you how to use Web Services to build self-managing components and systems. Finally, we discuss major research challenges that face the research community in the years ahead ⎯ challenges that will require collaboration among the best minds of academia, IBM, and other premier industry research laboratories.
The tutorial is appropriate for all attendees of ICAC ‘04. No special prior knowledge or experience is assumed or required. It may be of particular interest to professors or students who wish to meet and explore collaborations with IBM’s leading researchers in the field of autonomic computing.
Chair
Jeffrey O. Kephart
Mgr., Agents and Emergent Phenomena
IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center
kephart@us.ibm.com