Two weeks ago, Luis Moura Silva and Javier Alonso were in Boston (USA) to assist in the 6th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA07). They presented the paper “Using Virtualization to improve the Software Rejuvenation” (link: paper_ieee_nca_camera_ready.pdf ) written in collaboration with Prof. Luis Silva (Univ. Coimbra, Portugal) and Dr. Artur Andrzejak (ZIB, Germany). Furthermore, this paper was awarded the “Best paper award on Network Applications”. The paper presents an approach for software rejuvenation based on automated self-healing techniques that can be easily applied to off-the-shelf Application Servers and Internet sites. This self-healing scheme is meant to be the least disruptive as possible for running the service and results in zero downtime for most of the cases. In our scheme, we exploit the usage of virtualization to optimize the self-recovery actions. The results demonstrate that virtualization can be extremely helpful for software rejuvenation and fail-over in the occurrence of transient application failures and software aging. During the conference they have had the opportunity to meet different researchers and some potential collaboration can be opened in the short/middle term.

Last week Prof. Manish Parashar (Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University , New Jersey) was in Barcelona invited by our research group.

During his stay we discussed various themes of research in the area of Autonomic Computing and we have detected some possible areas for collaboration that should be explored from now on. On top of that, I’m thankful for the opportunity that Professor Parashar has given us to compare and contrast with him what the future of Autonomic Computing will be. We agreed that the discipline is cross-sectional and that in the near future it will become a part of many areas of current research.

During his stay Professor Parashar also gave a course, as a continuation of Omer F. Rana’s, in the area of Autonomic Computing. In the same way as the course from Omer F. Rana, it was taught as part of the new Masters of Research, “Computer Architecture, Networks and Systems” (CANS), from the Computer Architecture department in UPC. The title of the course was “Autonomic Computing: Concepts, Infrastructures and Applications” and was divided in three parts: (a) Overview, Motivations, Concepts (b) Approaches and Infrastructures (c) Realizations and Applications.

Like the course from Omer F. Rana, this course was impressive and the students enjoyed it very much with him. Whatsmore the students could contrast with Parashar some of his ideas on their respective doctorate works.

If you want more information about Professor Manish Parashar you can visit his web page at http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/~parashar/