Towards autonomic distributed and parallel server systems

这个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，由于其更大的规模和不断升级的硬件复杂性，人类越来越难以维护它们并有效地利用其丰富的软件资源。未来似乎越来越依赖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。高素质的程序员和系统管理员只需要更长的时间来生产比更复杂和更丰富的硬件。该提议具有通过促进以下来解决这些挑战的两个推力：i）通过一组自适应系统机制来自动化计算机系统管理，所述自适应系统机制解决性能瓶颈并自动且透明地对用户修复故障，以及ii）通过使用称为“transmittance Memory”的新编程范例来在分布式和并行环境中进行更简单的应用编程。虽然这两个项目的方向有广泛的适用性，我们将探讨在一个特定的复杂类的分布式系统，大型互联网系统，生成内容的飞行，称为动态内容服务器的应用程序中提出的技术。提供现代信息服务的动态内容服务器，例如，Amazon.com和EBay.com是通过组成在网络环境中交互以提供服务的各种软件系统而构建的。例如，电子商务系统通常由多层组成，例如数据库服务器、应用服务器和web服务器。组织目前花费大量的时间和精力在管理信息服务上，但不能保证成功。该项目将为网络信息服务提供重新配置、调整、自动代码并行化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.