Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
been categorized into five “stages of adoption” [
10
,
20
,
69
]:
Basic
,
Managed
,
Predictive
,
Adaptive
,and
Autonomic
.
Assessing where a system resides within these autonomic maturity lev-
els is not necessarily an easy task. Efforts are underway to define the re-
quired characteristics and metrics [
88
]. The overall AC maturity is established
from a combination of dimensions forming a natural continuum of autonomic
evolution [
80
], such as increasing functionality (manual, instrument-and-
monitor, analysis, closed-loop, to closed-loop-with-business-priorities) and
increasing scope (subcomponents, single-instances, multiple-instances-same
type, multiple-instances-different types, to business-systems) [
80
]. Since as-
sessment is becoming even more complex, efforts are currently underway to
automate the assessment process itself [
41
,
130
]. These efforts imply that the
autonomic computing initiative is following an evolutionary path.
8.1.5 Further Reading
The best starting point for further reading is IBM's “call to arms” launch
of the initiative [
63
], the autonomic “vision” paper [
79
], and the “dawning”
paper [
42
], as well as news about the autonomic initiative [
107
].
Since the launch of AC, IBM has released various white papers. The general
concepts within these have essentially been brought together into a book pub-
lished by IBM Press [
98
]. This topic covers IBM's view of Autonomicity and
how it strategically fits within their other initiatives (such as On-Demand).
Origins of some of the IBM thinking on autonomic computing can be at-
tributed to the active middleware services (AMS) community, where their
fifth workshop in Seattle in 2003 became the Autonomic Computing Work-
shop [
104
] and evolved, with IBM's backing, into the Autonomic Conference
(New York 2004) [
72
]. The early focus at this stage was very much on its
roots, i.e., middleware, infrastructures, and architectures. Other Autonomic
workshops include the Workshop on AI for Autonomic Computing, Work-
shop on Autonomic Computing Principles and Architectures, Workshop on
the Engineering of Autonomic Systems, Almaden Institute Symposium: Au-
tonomic Computing, Workshop on Autonomic Computing Systems, and the
Autonomic Applications Workshop; and related workshops such as the ACM
Workshop on Self-Healing, Adaptive and self-MANaged Systems (SHAMAN),
and the ACM Workshop on Self-healing Systems (WOSS).
Special issue journals are also beginning to appear [
53
,
170
]. The papers
in [
53
] generally cover engineering topics such as mirroring and replication
of servers, software hot swapping, and database query optimization. Those
in [
170
] strongly represent autonomic efforts for the grid, web, and networks.
Appreciating the wider context of autonomic computing, the boiling pot that
influenced AC can be found in other research initiatives such as Recovery
Oriented Computing [
19
].
