Autonomic Solutions for Virtualised ICT Systems

The environment within which information and computation systems oper-ate is changing. High bandwidth communication channels are everywhere and telecommunications infrastructure is continuing to be deregulated around the world. Both newcomers and more established companies are increasingly finding themselves operating in scenarios where they do not have full control or indeed full knowledge of key resources such as network infrastructure, data centres and computational capacity. These are resources which nonetheless remain vital to their continued successful operation and development. In this context, paradigms are being created for the development and deploy-ment of massively distributed computational and business systems, spanning many locations, organisations and platforms. Service-oriented computing is one such paradigm. In order for any organisation to work successfully within such a computational ecosystem, there is a need to find novel ways to manage, control and understand such highly complex distributed systems