A. Grassroots Approach to Self-Management in Large-Scale Distributed Systems.pdf

Grassroots Approach to Self-Management in Large-Scale Distributed Systems? Ozalp Babaoglu, Ma?rk Jelasity??, and Alberto Montresor Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Italy e-mail: babaoglu,jelasity,montreso@cs.unibo.it Abstract. Traditionally, autonomic computing is envisioned as replac- ing the human factor in the deployment, administration and mainte- nance of computer systems that are ever more complex. Partly to ensure a smooth transition, the design philosophy of autonomic computing sys- tems remains essentially the same as traditional ones, only autonomic components are added to implement functions such as monitoring, error detection, repair, etc. In this position paper we outline an alternative approach which we call “grassroots self-management”. While this ap- proach is by no means a solution to all problems, we argue that recent results from fields such as agent-based computing, the theory of complex systems and complex networks can be efficiently applied to achieve im- portant autonomic computing goals, especially in very large and dynamic environments. Unlike traditional compositional design, in the grassroots approach, desired properties like self-healing and self-organization are not programmed explicitly but rather “emerge” from the local interac- tions among the system components. Such solutions are potentially more robust to failures, are more scalable and are extremely simple to imple- ment. We discuss the practicality of grassroots autonomic computing through the examples of data aggregation, topology management and load balancing in large dynamic networks. 1 Introduction The desire to build fault-tolerant computer systems with an intuitive and simple user interface has always been part of the computer science research agenda. Yet, the current scale and complexity of computer systems is becoming alarm- ing, especially because our everyday life has come to depend on such systems to an increasing degree. There is a general feeling