Autonomous performance and risk management in large distributed systems and grids

Abstract

This chapter discusses autonomous performance and risk management in large distributed systems and grids. The DARPA UltraLog project has built and deployed a large scale experimental distributed mobile agent system designed to improve distributed system performance and survivability. The system is designed to self-adjust to meet performance and risk goals and constraints in a changing environment. The issue of performance and risk in an agent based system arises as it does with any distributed system or grid and is complicated by the autonomous and mobile nature of agents in a society. The natural parallelism present in many large scale problems makes them good candidates for an agent based solution with autonomous self-healing capabilities. The large logistics applications that are used as a test bed for DARPA Ultralog serve as testimony to the ability of large agent based systems to solve some of the world's most complex tasks in grid computing. The UltraLog system is designed to be a highly flexible and robust computing architecture that can meet requirements in performance and reliability and withstand attacks.