European researchers have built a system to create self-managing and self-repairing Internet applications under the auspices of the SELFMAN project. “We wanted to make big Internet applications easy so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself,” says project coordinator Peter Van Roy. Four crucial functions for application self-management–self-configuring, -tuning, -healing, and -protecting–were identified by the SELFMAN researchers. A highly structured approach was deemed necessary to incorporate all these functions into useful applications. Each application uses a structured overlay network as a platform, and the program keeps tabs on all nodes and links between them, and can choose when and how to correct problems. The second level contains a replicated storage system to ensure that every node has access to the same data, and that data is always replicated to guarantee that it does not vanish. On the third level resides a transactional problem-solver that delivers a systematic way of reaching agreement among any population of fallible elements using a sophisticated algorithm. Van Roy maintains that SELFMAN “will take the Internet to the next level.”
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