Measuring robustness of computing systems

Abstract

System builders are becoming increasingly interested in robust design. We believe that a methodology for generating robustness metrics will help the robust design research efforts and, in general, is an important step in the efforts to create robust computing systems. The purpose of the research in this paper is to quantify the robustness of a resource allocation, with the eventual objective of setting a standard that could easily be instantiated for a particular computing system to generate a robustness metric. The paper exposes how not considering the uncertainties can result in gross overestimation of the system capacity, and shows a method for reducing the impact of uncertainty, and even use it to our advantage if the uncertainties are correlated. We present our theoretical foundation for a robustness metric and give its instantiation for a particular system.