Self-Repairing computers

Self-Repairing computers

INTRODUCTION:

Digital computing performance has improved 10,000-fold in the past two decades: what took a year of number crunching in 1983 takes less than an hour nowadays, and a desktop computer from that era can't match the processing power of one of today's handheld organizers. We pay a price for these enhancements, though. As digital systems have grown in complexity, their operation has become brittle and unreliable.

Computer-related failures have become all too common. Personal computers crash or freeze up regularly; Internet sites go offline often. New software upgrades, designed to augment performance, may leave things worse than they were before.

Inconvenience aside, the situation is also an expensive one: annual outlays for maintenance, repairs and operations far exceed total hardware and software costs, for both individuals and corporations.

A group of research collaborators at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley has taken a new tack, by accepting that computer failure and human operator error are facts of life. Rather than trying to eliminate computer crashes--probably an impossible task--our team concentrates on designing systems that recover rapidly when mishaps do occur. The effort is an attempt to bring some of the self-healing ability of living creatures to the brittle world of computer, where component failures can bring down larger systems and ripple across a network to other computers as well. The idea is to bring up a broad range of software that will allow a part of Autonomic computing project.

for more info visit.
http://www.enjineer.com/forum