04.02.1020 - Institute Executve Director Bayne has been invited to attend the semi-annual meeting of the National Science Foundation's Center For Autonomic Computing (CAC, http://nsfcac.org). The meeting will be held at Microsoft's Redmond WA campus April 28-29, 2010.

Jointly, the University of Florida, the University of Arizona, Rutgers, and the State University of New Jersey have established a national research center for autonomic computing (CAC). This center is funded by the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program of the National Science Foundation, CAC members from industry and government, and university matching funds.

Autonomic computing (AC) denotes a broad area of scientific and engineering research on methods, architectures and technologies for the design, implementation, integration and evaluation of special- and general-purpose computing systems, components and applications that are capable of autonomously achieving desired behaviors. AC systems aim to be self-managed in order to enable independent operation, minimize cost and risk, accommodate complexity and uncertainty or enable systems of systems with large numbers of components. Hence, system integration and automation of management are important areas of research whose contexts subsume other AC research topics. These might include, to varying degrees, self-organization, self-healing, self-optimization (e.g., for power or speed), self-protection and other so-called self-* behaviors. CAC research activities will advance several disciplines that impact the specification, design, engineering and integration of autonomic computing and information processing systems. They include design and evaluation methods, algorithms, architectures, information processing, software, mathematical foundations and benchmarks for autonomic systems. Solutions will be studied at different levels of both centralized and distributed systems, including the hardware, networks, storage, middleware, services and information layers. Collectively, the participating universities have research and education programs whose strengths cover the technical areas of the center. Within this broad scope, the specific research activities will vary over time as a reflection of the needs of center member and the evolution of the field of autonomic computing.