February 17, 2004
Self-healing Computers
IBM recently unveiled business systems (software and hardware) that can heal and run themselves. This technology is known as self-healing technology or autonomic computing.
The basic premise for this technology was modeled on Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat world chess champion Gary Karparov. Big Blue was given a set of rules and weighed each option before making the best possible move. Self-healing machines can sense a problem or failing part in a network or system, analyze the difficulties and re-route to alternate networks, computers or even switch to a backup chip.
The ultimate goal is to have the machine think for itself without human input, to be able to boot up backup systems, and even to order spare parts to ensure sure that the people running the system never know there is a problem.
The 4 elements of self-managing autonomic systems include:
Self-configuring
The seamless integration of new hardware resources and the cooperative yielding of resources by the operating system is an important element of self-configuring systems. Hardware subsystems and resources can configure and re-configure autonomously both at boot time and during run time. This action may be initiated by the need to adjust the allocation of resources based on the current optimization criteria or in response to hardware or firmware faults. Self-configuring also includes the ability to concurrently add or remove hardware resources in response to commands from administrators, service personnel, or hardware resource management software.
Self-healing
With self-healing capabilities, platforms can detect hardware and firmware faults instantly and then contain the effects of the faults within defined boundaries. This allows platforms to recover from the negative effects of such faults with minimal or no impact on the execution of operating system and user-level workloads.
Self-optimizing
Self-optimizing capabilities allow computing systems to autonomously measure the performance or usage of resources and then tune the configuration of hardware resources to deliver improved performance.
Self-protecting
This allows computing systems to protect against internal and external threats to the integrity and privacy of applications and data.
IBM Information on Autonomic Computing
Posted by rsk at February 17, 2004 12:05 AM