Seminar Self-Healing Systems, Spring 2007
The seminar
Teachers: Tiina Niklander and
Kimmo Raatikainen
Time and location: Periods III-IV, Wed 16-18 C221
Introduction
IBM with its Autonomic Computing Initiative in 2001 introduced the concept self-managing computer systems as a way to overcome rapidly growing complexity of computing systems.Self-healing is one of the subgoals in the self-manageming systems. A self-healing system should be able to automatically and autonomously discovery faults and either correct them or figure out mechanisms to bypass their effects.
The self-healing build on old research in Fault-tolerant systems and systems recovery mechanisms. It need all the mechanisms there to increase the systems capabilities to detect faults and handle them automatically and correctly. The correction of faults is even more difficult task. The detected fault needs to be analysed and corrective actions taken.
An alternative viewpoint can be taken from the architecture point. Where the detections and corrections should be make?
This is a good time to have a seminar on this topic. There exists already some material to work with. Fist workshop on Self-healing systems was held in 2002.
A collection of some (older) articles can be found from a Seminar given in Rutgers university in 2004.
Structure of the seminar
The language of the seminar is English.Each student of the seminar has four tasks to perform:
- Write a paper about a topic agreed during the first lessons,
- Review two papers in advance,
- Prepare a presentation and discuss it with the other students, and
- Participate in the seminar by asking questions, raising discussions on the topic, and reviewing other students' work, this includes writing a study diary.
During the Period III all students write their papers in English. The length of the paper is 6-10 pages formatted according to the IEEE Transactions guidelines. The oral presentations, during the period IV, should last for approx. 40-45 minutes, which should leave some time for questions at the end or during the presentation.
IEEE guidelines for the paper (Latex and Word) can be found e.g. from the IEEE Transaction author guide: http://www.ieee.org/pubs/authors.html
A short (and old) guideline book to writing understandable English is The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. It is a classic book. It was originally published already in 1918, but most of its content is still valid. Especially the part III Elementary Principles of Composition is useful.Reviews
Everybody will review three papers. Each review has a public ja private part. The public part (overview + grades) is emailed to Tiina by Wednesday (21.2.) morning. The private part will be given directly to the author during the meeting. You can for example write the detailed comments to the paper itself.Schedule
The schedule of the seminar is divided into two phases. During the first study period, everybody will write their papers concurrently with the guidance of Tiina and using the feedback from the peer review of other participants. Then during the second period, we will meet once a week, and two students will present their topics.
In the first meeting we'll agree on the topics and Tiina will give an introductory presentation. A preliminary version was given in Petrozavodsk in August during our annual visit there.
Durign the first meeting the topics will be assigned to participants. Also some references may be available to some of the topics.
A nice paper explaining the review process of a journal. We can use it as a hint when doing our own reviews.Grading
Students will be graded based on i) their written paper (50%), ii) their oral presentation (30%), and iii) their activity in commenting other students' work and participating in the discussion (20%). To pass the course, the student must write the paper on the agreed subject and present his work. In addition, each student is required to attend at least 80% of the seminar presentations.Prerequisites
The topic of self-healing is relative new and not discussed that much in the courses. All participants must have a bachelor's degree or at least passed the Scientific Writing course. A general idea about software architectures, middleware and distribution issues should make it easier to understand the referenced articles.