Autonomic Computing

 Autonomic Computing Seminar Materials

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead

This quote made by the preeminent mathematician Alfred Whitehead holds both the lock and the key to the next era of computing. It implies a threshold moment surpassed only after humans have been able to automate increasingly complex tasks in order to achieve forward momentum.

There is every reason to believe that we are at just such a threshold right now in computing. The millions of businesses, billions of humans that compose them, and trillions of devices that they will depend upon all require the services of the I/T industry to keep them running. And it's not just a matter of numbers.

It's the complexity of these systems and the way they work together that is creating shortage of skilled I/T workers to manage all of the systems. The high-tech industry has spent decades creating computer systems with ever- mounting degrees of complexity to solve a wide variety of business problems. Ironically, complexity itself has become part of the problem. It’s a problem that's not going away, but will grow exponentially, just as our dependence on technology has. But as Mr. Whitehead so eloquently put it nearly a century ago, the solution may lie in automation, or creating a new capacity where important computing operations can run without the need for human intervention.

“Autonomic Computing” is a new vision of computing initiated by IBM. This new paradigm shifts the fundamental definition of the technology age from one of computing, to one defined by data. Access to data from multiple, distributed sources, in addition to traditional centralized storage devices will allow users to transparently access information when and where they need it. At the same time, this new view of computing will necessitate changing the industry's focus on processing speed and storage to one of developing distributed networks that are largely self-managing, self-diagnostic, and transparent to the user.

The term autonomic is derived from human biology. The autonomic nervous system monitors our heartbeat, checks our blood sugar level and keeps our body temperature close to 98.6 °F, without any conscious effort on our part. In much the same way, autonomic computing components anticipate computer system needs and resolve problems —with minimal human intervention. 

However, there is an important distinction between autonomic activity in the human body and autonomic responses in computer systems. Many of the decisions made by autonomic elements in the body are involuntary, whereas autonomic elements in computer systems make decisions based on tasks you choose to delegate to the technology. In other words, adaptable policy — rather than rigid hard coding determines the types of decisions and actions autonomic elements make in computer systems.