Advances in Autonomic Components & Services

Hierarchical autonomic management of structured grid applications can be efficiently implemented using production rule engines. Rules of the form "precondition -> action" can be used to model the behaviour of autonomic managers in such a way that the autonomic control and the application management strategy are kept separate. This simplifies the manager design as well as user customization of autonomic manager policies. We briefly introduce rule-based autonomic managers. Then we discuss an implementation of a GCM-like behavioural skeleton – a composite component modelling a standard parallelism exploitation pattern with its own autonomic controller – in SCA/Tuscany. The implementation uses the JBoss rules engine to provide an autonomic behavioural skeleton component and services to expose the component functionality to the standard service framework. Performance results are discussed and finally similarities and differences with respect to the ProActive-based reference GCM implementation are discussed briefly.