AutoMate: enabling autonomic applications on the grid

The increasing complexity, heterogeneity and dynamism of networks, systems, services applications have made our computational/information infrastructure brittle, unmanageable and insecure. This has necessitated the investigation of a new paradigm for design, development and deployment based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with complexity, heterogeneity, and uncertainty, i.e. autonomic computing. This paper introduces the AutoMate project and describes its key components. The overall objective of AutoMate is to investigate key technologies to enable the development of autonomic grid applications that are context aware and are capable of self-configuring, self-composing, self-optimizing and self-adapting. Specifically, it will investigate the definition of autonomic components, the development of autonomic applications as dynamic composition of autonomic components, and the design of key enhancements to existing grid middleware and runtime services to support these applications.