This month John Moore writes two articles for 'Federal Computer Week' -- Vendors approaches to autonomic computing differ and Computer, heal thyself.
John writes that "IBM Corp. has its autonomic computing effort, Hewlett-Packard Co. pursues the concept with its Adaptive Enterprise Initiative and Sun Microsystems Inc. is developing the N1Grid. Specialty firms such Cassatt Corp. and Stottler Henke Associates Inc. also figure in the mix."
Many government agencies are interested in autonomic computing -- most notable are "Energy Department labs, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service are looking into self-managing technology for business computing."
Highlighting some of the current 'autonomic' projects, John writes "DOE, for example, is testing software designed to help computer clusters and grids diagnose problems and automatically recover from faults. Stottler Henke, a software development firm, created the technology under a Small Business Innovation Research contract with the agency. The company calls its Agent-Based High Availability (ABHA) system smart job recovery software. The software will be put to use at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in an application that analyzes data from a nuclear physics experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. ABHA helps clusters process long-running batch jobs. When a job fails, the software diagnoses the problem and, if possible, restarts the job, according to company officials."
John Moore also emphasizes the close relationship, and interdependencies between cluster, or grid, computing and autonomic computing -- as computing becomes far more distributed more things can go wrong, thus the perceived need for 'autonomic' functionality.
A worry that is mentioned jokingly in John's 'Computer, heal thyself' article is that we will find ourselves in a 'Hal 9000' situation -- "the fictitious computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey," whose predictive maintenance function doomed its human crewmates, raises a serious cultural issue. For the autonomic model to take off, customers must have faith in software to set the proper course. "It amounts to trust," Charles Earl, a research scientist with Stottler Henke said. "How much trust do you have in a program to take some corrective action?"
K-Collector Topics: Autonomic Computing innovation research Writing IBM