I know I talked about "autonomic computing" very recently, but I just read two articles this past week which lead me to revisit the subject.
I'll focus mainly on the Economist article.
Computer systems and their "organs" -- eg, microprocessors, applications and networks -- are becoming ever more powerful. But they are also becoming ever more complex, and so have to be managed by a fast-growing army of information technology (IT) worker bees. That is why, last October, IBM launched an initiative called "autonomic computing", which is now starting to gain serious attention.
"It's time to design and build computing systems capable of running themselves," writes Paul Horn, IBM's senior vice-president of research, in the initiative's "manifesto".
[Note: This "manifesto" is available (in PDF format -- 22 pages) here.]
Dr Horn's manifesto could, one day, be seen as marking the turning-point when the business started -- after several unsuccessful attempts -- to change its ways in earnest. Instead of focusing primarily on performance and new features, the industry now has a chance to spend more on making things actually work.
Recent marketing campaigns show that IT firms have suddenly discovered increased demand for things such as reliability and availability. Oracle praises its databases in adverts as "unbreakable". Microsoft wants to be the champion of "trustworthy computing". IT consultancies are pushing similar themes. Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently coined the term "organic IT." By this, it means IT infrastructure "built on cheap, redundant components that automatically shares and manages enterprise computing resources."
So let's look at some recent projects in the industry.
IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Centre in Yorktown Heights, New York, is already working on the elements of such autonomic systems. One project is the firm's next generation of supercomputers, code-named Blue Gene. These machines will have more than a million processors, each capable of a billion operations per second (one gigaflop). Together, they will be 100 times more powerful than IBM's fastest computer today.
Other computer firms are pursuing similar research -- and, in some areas, are ahead of IBM. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, has a project called "planetary computing". Researchers at HP's laboratories in Palo Alto, California, are working on a data centre with as many as 50,000 servers. The plan is to have such computing installations spread across the world and linked via super-fast fibre lines.
And Sun Microsystems, for its part, is already past the prototype stage. In the imminent future, the firm will introduce its much awaited "N1" initiative. This is essentially an operating system for data centres that turns the whole network into a computer -- Sun's goal since its beginnings.
I also recommend that you read the long article that Eric Knorr wrote for CIO Magazine in its October 1 Issue: "It's Alive! Don't you wish the data center could look after itself?"
I'm already too long today, so here are two short quotes.
Autonomic computing, a phrase coined by IBM, describes technology that self-regulates and even heals itself much as the human body would do. "When I say technology, I'm including all of the software, all of the applications, all of the storage, all the pieces of the infrastructure," explains Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy for IBM's server group.
"Autonomic computing is just the IBM term," says Duncan Hill, CTO of Think Dynamics. "There are a lot of terms out there that ultimately mean the same thing: Computing infrastructure that adapts to meet the demands of the applications that are running in it." In other words, IT develops and deploys applications, and the infrastructure more or less takes care of itself -- adjusting automatically as applications and workloads change. The ultimate effect is not only less work but also much more effective utilization of data center resources.
Sources: The Economist print edition, September 19, 2002; Eric Knorr, CIO Magazine, October 1, 2002 Issue
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