Research

– The Jade project –

autonomic management of distributed applications

The Jade project is centered on the topic of autonomic computing. Autonomic computing refers to systems capable of self-management, including self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, and self-protection.

The Jade framework is organized in four main parts:

A set of autonomic managers, each of which implements a control loop for a specific function, as described in the autonomic computing presentation.

A set of common services, which provide various functions needed for the construction of the autonomic managers such as node discovery, resources allocation and deployment.

A representation of the managed system. This is the knowledge base needed by the autonomic managers to fulfill their function. This representation is derived from a description of the structural organization of the managed system in terms of composition and architecture.

The managed system, in the form of a set of interconnected components, wrapped as explained above to provide a uniform management interface.

The management interface allows the following actions to be performed on the managed system (be it an individual component or the whole system):

Manage the component's lifecycle (e.g., start, suspend, stop) and attributes.

Introspect the component's properties.

For a composite component (a component that includes other components), manage its contents, e.g., by adding or removing a subcomponent or by changing subcomponents' bindings.

More details on the self-healing case

Jade has been transferred to the Objectweb Jasmine project. Jasmine aims to develop an administration tool in order to facilitate the job of the system administrator. It relies on management features provided by Jade autonomous management framework. Jade is supported by the ANR Selfware project (in french).

Main references

Sara Bouchenak, Fabienne Boyer, Daniel Hagimont, Sacha Krakowiak, Adrian Mos, Noël de Palma, Vivien Quema, and Jean-Bernard Stefani. Architecture-based autonomous repair management: An application to j2ee clusters. In The 24th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2005), pp. 13-24 , Orlando, FL, USA, October 2005 [pdf]

Sylvain Sicard, Fabienne Boyer, Noël de Palma. Using Components for Architecture-Based Management: the Self-Repair case, Proceedings of Int. Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’08), pp. 101-110, may 2008 [pdf]

Jérémy Philippe, Noël de Palma, Fabienne Boyer, Olivier Gruber. Self-Adapting QoS in Java Enterprise Edition, Proceedings of Int. Middleware Conference (Middleware’09), pp. 143-162, nov 2009.

Jérémy Philippe, Noël de Palma, Fabienne Boyer, Olivier Gruber. Self Adaptation of Service Level in Distributed Systems, Software Practice and Experience 40(3) (SPE), pp. 259-283, 2010.

Sara Bouchenak , Fabienne Boyer , Benoit Claudel, Noël de Palma , Olivier Gruber, Sylvain Sicard. Autonomic Systems: from Self to Self-Self Behavior, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptative Systems (TAAS), 2011.