Towards autonomic distributed and parallel server systems

该研究项目的长期目标是简化分布式和并行计算机系统的编程和管理。随着计算机系统变得越来越强大，由于它们的规模越来越大，硬件复杂性也越来越高，人类越来越难以维护它们，也越来越难以有效地利用它们丰富的软件资源。未来似乎越来越依赖于昂贵的专家程序员和管理员团队。这对工业界和学术界来说都是一个关键问题。与更复杂、更丰富的硬件相比，高素质的程序员和系统管理员需要更长的时间来生产硬件。该提案有两个重点，通过促进解决这些挑战：i)通过一组自适应系统机制来自动化计算机系统管理，这些机制可以自动地、透明地向用户解决性能瓶颈和修复故障；ii)通过使用称为“事务性内存”的新编程范式，在分布式和并行环境中简化应用程序编程。虽然这两个项目方向都具有广泛的适用性，但我们将探索所提出的技术在特定复杂的分布式系统中的应用，即动态内容服务器，即实时生成内容的大型互联网系统。提供现代信息服务的动态内容服务器，如Amazon.com和EBay.com，是由在网络环境中相互作用以提供服务的各种软件系统组成的。例如，电子商务系统通常由多层组成，如数据库服务器、应用程序服务器和web服务器。组织目前在管理信息服务上花费了大量的时间和精力，但没有成功的保证。该项目将为网络信息服务中的重新配置、调优、自动代码并行化和无缝故障恢复提供自动功能，这将使依赖这些服务的组织更容易部署和管理它们。

The long term goal of this research project is to simplify the programming and management of distributed and parallel computer systems. As computer systems become more powerful, due to their larger scale and escalating hardware complexity, it is becoming harder for humans to maintain them and to effectively exploit their plentiful resources in software. The future seems to hold increasing dependence on expensive teams of expert programmers and administrators. This is a critical problem for industry and academia alike. Highly qualified programmers and system administrators simply take longer to produce than more complex and more plentiful hardware. This proposal has two thrusts that address these challenges by facilitating: i) automated computer system management through a set of adaptive system mechanisms that address performance bottlenecks and repair faults automatically and transparently to the user and ii) simpler application programming in distributed and parallel environments through the use of a new programming paradigm called "Transactional Memory". Although both project directions have wide applicability, we will explore the application of the proposed techniques in a specific complex class of distributed systems, that of large-scale Internet systems that generate content on-the-fly, called dynamic content servers. Dynamic content servers providing modern information services, e.g., Amazon.com and EBay.com, are built by composing a variety of software systems that interact within a networked environment to provide the service. For example, electronic commerce systems typically consist of multiple tiers, such as, database servers, application servers, and web servers. Organizations currently spend much time and effort on managing information services, with no guarantee of success. This project will provide automatic capabilities for reconfiguration, tuning, automatic code parallelization and seamless failure recovery in networked information services, which will make it easier for organizations that rely on these services to deploy and manage them.