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Synthesis of application-level utility functions for autonomic self-assessment

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Abstract

We present an approach to self-assessment for Autonomic Computing, based on the synthesis of utility functions, at the level of an autonomic application, or even a single task or feature performed by that application. This paper describes the fundamental steps of our approach: instrumentation of the application; collection of exhaustive samples of runtime data about relevant quality attributes of the application, as well as characteristics of its runtime environment; synthesis of a utility function through statistical correlation over the collected data points; and embedding of code corresponding to the equation of the synthesized utility function within the application, which enables the computation of utility values at run time. We describe a number of case studies, with their results and implications, to motivate and discuss the significance of application-level utility, illustrate our statistical synthesis method, and present our framework for instrumentation, monitoring, and utility function embedding/evaluation.

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Abbreviations

Aupy::

Application utility in Python;

BSD::

Berkeley Software Distribution;

COTS::

Common Off-The-Shelf;

CPU::

Central Processing Unit;

FTP::

File Transfer Protocol;

JDK::

Java Development Kit;

IP::

Internet Protocol;

IT::

Information Technology;

MAPE-K::

Monitor, Analyze, Plan and Execute-Knowledge;

NTP::

Network Time Protocol;

QoS::

Quality of Service;

RFC::

Request For Contribution;

RL::

Reinforcement Learning;

SSH::

Secure Shell;

VoIP::

Voice over IP

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Giuseppe Valetto, Paul deGrandis & Dale Seybold Jr.

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  1. Giuseppe Valetto
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  2. Paul deGrandis
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  3. Dale Seybold Jr.
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Correspondence to Giuseppe Valetto.

Additional information

This is an extended version of the paper “Elicitation and Utilization of Application-level Utility Functions”, published in the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2009), Barcelona, Spain, June 2009.

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Valetto, G., deGrandis, P. & Seybold, D. Synthesis of application-level utility functions for autonomic self-assessment. Cluster Comput 14, 275–293 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-010-0130-y

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