Goal Oriented Resource Management

Abstract

Managing the performance of distributed computing environments is today a serious challenge, because of their complexity and the diversity of new applications. Digital audio and video data, with strict delay and jitter constraints, are moved and manipulated in a computing, storage and communication medium where more traditional batch, transaction and query processing applications are already in operation and expected to achieve preset levels of throughput or average response time. Enterprise wide systems will soon surface where, for example, resources are shared among applications running high volume, low response time inventory control transactions with strong CPU time demands, applications managing videoconferences with tight delay and massive bandwidth requirements, engineering visualization tools with similar requirements, background decision support queries with soft completion deadlines and large memory needs, or process control tasks with hard real time constraints and demands for immediate use of CPU, memory or bandwidth.

The research reported here was conducted while the author was with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights NY 10598, USA.