Towards autonomic distributed and parallel server systems

这一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，由于它们的规模更大，硬件复杂性不断上升，人类维护它们和有效利用其丰富的软件资源变得越来越困难。未来似乎越来越依赖昂贵的专业程序员和管理员团队。对于工业界和学术界来说，这都是一个关键问题。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只是需要更长的时间来生产。这一建议有两个重点，通过促进：i)通过一组自适应系统机制实现自动化计算机系统管理，这些机制解决性能瓶颈并自动且对用户透明地修复故障；以及ii)通过使用一种称为“事务存储器”的新编程范例，简化分布式和并行环境中的应用程序编程。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一类特定的复杂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规模互联网系统。提供现代信息服务的动态内容服务器，例如Amazon.com和eBay.com，是通过组成在联网环境中交互以提供服务的各种软件系统来构建的。例如，电子商务系统通常由多个层组成，例如数据库服务器、应用服务器和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，但不能保证成功。该项目将在联网信息服务中提供重新配置、调整、自动代码并行和无缝故障恢复的自动能力，这将使依赖这些服务的组织更容易部署和管理这些服务。

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.