Application heartbeats: a generic interface for specifying program performance and goals in autonomous computing environments

The rise of multicore computing has greatly increased sys-tem complexity and created an additional burden for soft-ware developers. This burden is especially troublesome when it comes to optimizing software on modern computing sys-tems. Autonomic or adaptive computing has been proposed as one method to help application programmers handle this complexity. In an autonomic computing environment, sys-tem services monitor applications and automatically adapt their behavior to increase the performance of the applica-tions they support. Unfortunately, applications often run as performance black-boxes and adaptive services must infer application performance from low-level information or rely on system-specific ad hoc methods. This paper proposes a standard framework, Application Heartbeats, which ap