Utility Functions in Autonomic Systems

  • Authors:
  • Gerald Tesauro;Jeffrey O. Kephart

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

  • Venue:
  • ICAC '04 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomic Computing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Utility functions provide a natural and advantageous framework for achieving self-optimization in distributed autonomic computing systems. We present a distributed architecture, implemented in a realistic prototype data center, that demonstrates how utility functions can enable a collection of autonomic elements to continually optimize the use of computational resources in a dynamic, heterogeneous environment. Broadly, the architecture is a two-level structure of independent autonomic elements that supports flexibility, modularity, and self-management. Individual autonomic elements manage application resource usage to optimize local service-level utility functions, and a global Arbiter allocates resources among application environments based on resource-level utility functions obtained from the managers of the applications. We present empirical data that demonstrate the effectiveness of our utility function scheme in handling realistic, fluctuating Web-based transactional workloads running on a Linux cluster.