Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T13:59:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 29 / Hewlett-Packard Brasil Ltda / A implantação e a configuração de aplicações em grades computacionais são tarefas exaustivas e sujeitas a erros, ainda representando elo fraco do ciclo de vida de aplicações desta natureza. Para lidar com o problema, este trabalho propõe AGrADC, uma arquitetura para instanciação sob demanda de aplicações em grades que incorpora características da Computação Autônoma.Esta arquitetura instrumenta o processo de desenvolvimento de aplicações para grades computacionais, oferecendo ferramentas para definir (a) um fluxo de implantação, respeitando pendências entre componentes que compõem a aplicação, (b) parâmentros de configuração e (c) ações a serem executadas diante de situações adversas tais como falhas. O resultado desse processo, materializado na forma de um conjunto de descrições, é repassado a um motor de instanciação, que passa utonomamente conduzir e gerenciar o processo de implantação e configuração / Deployment and configuration of grid computing applications are eshaustive and error-prone tasks, representing a weak link of the lifecycle of grid applications. To adress the problem, this work proposes AGrADC, an arquitecture to instantiate grid applications on demand, which incorporates features from the Autonomic Computing paradigm. This architecture improves the grid applications development process, providing tools to define (a) a deployment flow, respecting dependencies among components that comprise the application, (b) configuration paramenters and (c) actions to be executed when adverse situations like faults arise. The result of this process, materialized in the form of a set of descriptions, is delivered to an istantiation engine, which starts to autonomously conduct and manage the deployment and configuration process.

Sensoriamento urbano e cidades inteligentes têm sido tópicos derivados da computação ubíqua em alta nos últimos anos, tanto para a academia como para a indústria, devido ao contínuo avanço tecnológico aliado à maior facilidade de acesso e aceitação pelos usuários. Na literatura pesquisada sobre plataformas que englobam tais tópicos foi constatado que diversas delas possuem algum processo autonômico utilizado para atender alguma necessidade de autoadaptação em tempo de execução. Apesar disso, nenhuma das plataformas pesquisadas focou especificamente em encontrar e propor uma solução para tratar exclusivamente a autoadaptação. Nesse contexto, esta dissertação tem por objetivo propor um mecanismo de autoadaptação para sistemas de sensoriamento urbano, além de avaliar seu comportamento. Como primeiro passo para realizar tal objetivo, foi conduzida uma pesquisa literária tendo em vistas identificar os principais casos de adaptação em sistemas de sensoriamento urbano, além de requisitos específicos da arquitetura de sensoriamento urbano UrboSenti, utilizada para implementação. Como segundo passo, a partir dos requisitos identificados, o modelo MAPE-K da computação autonômica foi escolhido como a base da construção do mecanismo de autoadaptação. A implementação deste modelo utilizou as técnicas de eventos passivos para monitoramento do ambiente, regras Evento-Condição-Ação, para tomada de decisão, planos estáticos para planejamento e adaptações por parâmetros e componentes para execução. Tanto o modelo como as técnicas escolhidas foram implementadas devido atenderem as necessidades dos cenários avaliados. Por fim, as avaliações aplicadas apontam resultados preliminares satisfatórios, dados os casos avaliados e os experimentos de tempo de resposta a eventos internos e interações; no entanto, tais avaliações revelarem diversos pontos que devem ser explorados em trabalhos futuros. / In the last years, urban sensing and smart cities have been popular topics derived from the ubiquitous computing, for both the academia and the industry, due to its continuous technological development combined with greater facilities of access and acceptance by the users. The reviewed literature about platforms that encompass such topics showed that many of them have some kind of autonomic process used to meet any need for self-adaptation at runtime. Despite this, none of the researched platforms focused in proposing a solution to exclusively meet the self-adaptation properties. In this way, this dissertation aims to propose a self-adaptive mechanism to urban sensing systems, as well as evaluating its behavior. As the first step to achieving such goal, a literature review was performed aiming to identify the main adaptation cases in urban sensing systems, as well to identify the specific requirements of the UrboSenti architecture for urban sensing. As the second step, the autonomic computing MAPE-K model was chosen to compose the foundation of the self-adaptive mechanism based on the identified requirements. The implementation of this model used the techniques of passive events for monitoring, rules Event-Condition-Action for decision making, static plans for planning and parameter and component adaptations for execution were used in the proposed implementation to meet the evaluated scenario needs. Lastly, the applied evaluations indicate satisfactory results, given the assessed cases and the experiments of scalability at the response of internal events and interactions. However, they have left many open points that should be explored in future works.

<p>A2B Electronics AB is a company that develops and manufactures products and technology for digital cable television. A2B's new EXM-product family translates digital television channels from multiple source networks into a single destination network. Multiple EXM-units are connected in a system to provide a custom set of TV channels. To minimize the administrative effort, the units in a system should be able to interact and collaborate without manual intervention. The purpose of this thesis is to propose an underlying system that supports seamless interaction and collaboration between units.</p><p>The autonomic system concept has served as a foundation for the proposed solution. The requirements for the EXM-system proved to be similar to many properties of an autonomic system. The proposed solution was elaborated by answering five reseach questions. The answers describe how an autonomic system can be implemented with the prerequisites of the EXM-system. Solutions for service availability, configuration preservation, system state changes and automatic addressing and communication are provided.</p><p>The project has resulted in a proposal of a general autonomic system. The solution has also been implemented as prototype that runs both in a simulator and on the EXM-hardware. The simulator was also developed in the scope of this project as a side-effect of the limited access to EXM-hardware.</p><p>The proposed solution together with the prototype can hopefully serve as a base for projects with prerequisites similar to the project described in this thesis.</p>

This thesis investigates designs that enable individual components of a distributed system to work together and coordinate their actions towards a common goal. While the basic motivation for our research is to develop engineering principles for large-scale autonomous systems, we address the problem in the context of resource management in server clusters that provide web services. To this end, we have developed, implemented and evaluated a decentralized design for resource management that follows four principles. First, in order to facilitate scalability, each node has only partial knowledge of the system. Second, each node can adapt and change its role at runtime. Third, each node runs a number of local control mechanisms independently and asynchronously from its peers. Fourth, each node dynamically adapts its local configuration in order to optimize a global utility function. The design includes three fundamental building blocks: overlay construction, request routing and application placement. Overlay construction organizes the cluster nodes into a single dynamic overlay. Request routing directs service requests towards nodes with available resources. Application placement partitions the cluster resources between applications, and dynamically adjusts the allocation in response to changes in external load, node failures, etc. We have evaluated the design using complexity analysis, simulation and prototype implementation. Using complexity analysis and simulation, we have shown that the system is scalable, operates efficiently in steady state, quickly adapts to external events and allows for effective service differentiation by a system administrator. A prototype has been built using accepted technologies (Java, Tomcat) and evaluated using standard benchmarks (TPC-W and RUBiS). The evaluation results show that the behavior of the prototype matches closely that of the simulated design for key metrics related to adaptability and robustness, therefore validating our design and proving its feasibility. / QC 20100629

With the rapid growth of servers and applications spurred by the Internet economy, power consumption in today's data centers is reaching unsustainable limits. This has led to an imminent financial, technical and environmental crisis that is impacting the society at large. Hence, it has become critically important that power consumption be efficiently managed in these computing power-houses of today. In this work, we revisit the issue of adaptive power and performance management of data center server platforms. Traditional data center servers are statically configured and always over-provisioned to be able to handle peak load. We transform these statically configured data center servers to clairvoyant entities that can sense changes in the workload and dynamically scale in capacity to adapt to the requirements of the workload. The over-provisioned server capacity is transitioned to low-power states and they remain in those states for as long as the performance remains within given acceptable thresholds. The platform power expenditure is minimized subject to performance constraints. This is formulated as a performance-per-watt optimization problem and solved using analytical power and performance models. Coarse-grained optimizations at the platform-level are refined by local optimizations at the devices-level namely - the processor & memory subsystems. Our adaptive interleaving technique for memory power management yielded about 48.8% (26.7 kJ) energy savings compared to traditional techniques measured at 4.5%. Our adaptive platform power and performance management technique demonstrated 56.25% energy savings for memory-intensive workload, 63.75% savings for processor-intensive workload and 47.5% savings for a mixed workload while maintaining platform performance within given acceptable thresholds.

Distributed systems, characterized by their ability to ensure the execution of multiple transactions across a myriad of applications, constitute a prime platform for building Web applications. However, Web application interactions raise issues pertaining to security and performance that make manual security management both time-consuming and challenging. This thesis is a testimony to the security and performance enhancements afforded by using the autonomic computing paradigm to design an adaptive cryptographic access control framework for dynamic data sharing environments. One of the methods of enforcing cryptographic access control in these environments is to classify users into one of several groups interconnected in the form of a partially ordered set. Each group is assigned a single cryptographic key that is used for encryption/decryption. Access to data is granted only if a user holds the "correct" key, or can derive the required key from the one in their possession. This approach to access control is a good example of one that provides good security but has the drawback of reacting to changes in group membership by replacing keys, and re-encrypting the associated data, throughout the entire hierarchy. Data re-encryption is time-consuming, so, rekeying creates delays that impede performance. In order to support our argument in favor of adaptive security, we begin by presenting two cryptographic key management (CKM) schemes in which key updates affect only the class concerned or those in its sub-poset. These extensions enhance performance, but handling scenarios that require adaptability remain a challenge. Our framework addresses this issue by allowing the CKM scheme to monitor the rate at which key updates occur and to adjust resource (keys and encrypted data versions) allocations to handle future changes by anticipation rather than on demand. Therefore, in comparison to quasi-static approaches, the adaptive CKM scheme minimizes the long-term cost of key updates. Finally, since self-protecting CKM requires a lesser degree of physical intervention by a human security administrator, we consider the case of "collusion attacks" and propose two algorithms to detect as well as prevent such attacks. A complexity and security analysis show the theoretical improvements our schemes offer. Each algorithm presented is supported by a proof of concept implementation, and experimental results to show the performance improvements. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-10-16 16:19:46.617

As the use of Web expands, Web Service is gradually becoming the basic system infrastructure. However, as it matures and a large number of Web Service becomes available, the focus will shift from service development to service management. One key component in management systems is monitoring. The growing complexity of Web Service platforms and their dynamically varying workloads make manually monitoring them a demanding task. Therefore monitoring tools are required to support the management efforts. Our approach, Web Service Monitoring System (WSMS), utilizes Autonomic Computing technology to monitor Web Service for an automated manager. WSMS correlates lower level events into a meaningful diagnosed symptom which provides higher level information for problem determination. It also gains the ability to take autonomic actions and solve the original problem using corrective actions. In this thesis, a complete design of WSMS is presented along with a practical implementation showing viability and proof of concept of WSMS. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-11-12 16:20:13.738

Computing systems' complexity appears to be approaching the limits of human capabilities. To cope with the rapidly growing complexity of operating, managing and integrating computing systems, one of the most promising options is Autonomic Systems, which are computing systems that can manage themselves given high-level objectives from administrators. Self-management means that the system self configures at run time to increase responsiveness and agility, self-heals to improve business resiliency, self-optimizes to improve operational efficiency and self-protects itself from malicious attacks. While traditional approaches to computer systems are often centralized and hierarchical, Autonomic Systems are highly distributed with complex connectivity and interactions, rendering centralized management schemes infeasible. In this thesis, we describe the design and implementation of a decentralized architecture based on mobile multi-agent systems-an approach to building Autonomic Systems. Based on the proposed architecture, we developed a prototype application-an electronic marketplace, which achieves a set of desired features of Autonomic Systems such as autonomy, hiding complexity and self-healing. We put forth Autonomic Systems, a self-managing distributed computing system, as a new and promising application domain for multi-agent system ideas and argue that an Agent-based approach is well suited to construct Autonomic Systems.

Autonomic computing has become more prevalent and, hence, its evaluation is becoming more important. In this thesis, we address the issue of evaluating the software architecture of self-healing applications with respect to the changes and adaptation over long periods of time. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed an analysis and reasoning framework for the architecture of self-healing systems. The reasoning framework is based on attribute-based architectural styles (ABASs) and is tailored to selected quality attributes. When an autonomic system evolves, the proposed reasoning framework can be used to re-analyze the system and verify certain quality attributes. The explicitly available relationship between architecture and quality attributes not only helps in documenting the current architecture design, but also allows developers to reuse the architectural analysis during long-term evolution when the original system designers are long gone. Hence, the proposed framework can facilitate both design and maintenance of self-healing systems. In order to develop the analysis and reasoning framework, we identified key quality attributes for self-healing systems. We have also defined new autonomic-specific quality attributes for the self-healing systems, which includes support for detecting anomalous system behaviour, support for failure diagnosis, support for simulation of expected behaviour, support for differencing between expected and actual behaviour, and support for testing of correct behaviour. Further, we customized the ISO 9126 quality model to the quality requirements of self-healing systems, considering both traditional attributes as well as newly defined autonomic-specific attributes.

Present-day IT environments are complex, heterogeneous tangles of hardware, middleware and software from multiple venders that are becoming increasingly difficult to integrate, install, configure, tune and maintain. In order to combat this increasing level of complexity, automating many of the functions associated with computing today seems to be a reasonable solution. IBM, inspired by the autonomic nervous system of the human body which regulates without any conscious intervention, chose to call this paradigm Autonomic Computing-computing using adaptive and self-managing systems with minimal human intervention. Autonomic computing poses several research challenges. In an endeavor to hide complexity, autonomic systems give up, to a certain extent, accountability to the user. Consequently, autonomic systems exhibit fewer cause and effect relationships and therefore engender trust and adoption issues. In other words, the system itself takes over control whereby it may or may not operate as per user expectations during its operation. Our goal is to develop a framework of trust that will be useful for developers of autonomic computing applications or self-managed systems dealing with trust issues. Our approach gathers key trust topics, issues, nomenclature, taxonomies, and user task models from the literature which are then distilled and pruned to form our own trust framework which is intended to aid developers in the design of self-managed systems. We then use IBM`s Tivoli provisioning system, which is one of the most successful autonomic systems, to consolidate our framework. Finally, we evaluate our framework by trying to identify the strengths and weaknesses with respect to trust of self-managed systems by performing a case study on a non-deployed autonomic e-Commerce prototype.