ABSTRACT

The explosive growth of IT and cloud infrastructures, coupled with the diversity of their components and a shortage of skilled IT workers, have resulted into systems whose control and timely management exceeds human ability. The mission of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) is to advance the knowledge of how to design and engineer computing systems and applications that are capable of managing themselves, adapting their resources and operations to current workloads and anticipating the needs of their users. The CAC with three university sites (the University of Arizona, the Mississippi State University, and Texas Tech University) will lead research of innovative designs and programming paradigms for cloud and computing systems that can self-configure, self-heal, self-optimize and self-protect with minimal involvement of IT administrators or users. We are planning to involve the Auto Industry through the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM), who is an affiliated member with UA. The CAC not only advances the science of autonomic computing but also accelerates its transfer to industry by closely working with industrial partners in the definition of projects pursued by the CAC, and contributing to the education of a workforce capable of designing and deploying cloud and autonomic computing systems. The CAC will involve students and faculty from underrepresented groups through several dissemination and recruiting initiatives at each site.


Today's IT and cloud infrastructures face significant management challenges that result from, among other factors, their distributed nature, their need to adapt to unanticipated demands, their heterogeneity, their size, large numbers of users and great complexity and diversity of IT and cloud services. The mission of CAC is to engage academics, industrial and government partners in joint efforts that accelerate both our understanding of the fundamentals of cloud and autonomic computing, and the transfer of these fundamentals into industry solutions and education of a workforce capable of designing autonomic systems in general and cloud systems in particular. The CAC will conduct research on how to enable systems to be self-managed with respect to performance, fault, security, resilience, power consumption, etc. Unlike past attempts that address these properties in isolation, the CAC will endeavor to pursue integrated approaches that address more than one property. The technical scope of the Center?s activities includes design and evaluation methods, algorithms, architectures, software, mathematical foundations and benchmarks for cloud and autonomic systems. Solutions are studied for different levels of both centralized and distributed systems, including the hardware, networks, storage, middleware, services and information layers. The CAC solutions will focus more on self-management and security issues in Internet of Things (IoT), critical infrastructures and cloud systems and applications. The following are concrete examples of industry-relevant technical challenges that the CAC will address in the context of autonomic IT infrastructures: Automatic management of performance and energy consumption in large scale data centers and cloud systems; Securing and protecting the operations of sensors and actuators in IoT environments and their applications or services; Predictive modeling of quality-of-service of IT and cloud resources and applications; Dynamic resource provisioning and scheduling of computer resources; Autonomic management and protection of critical infrastructures; and Automation of system management operations of Internet of Things (IoT) resources and services.

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