Computer System, Heal Thyself

Researchers are accelerating work on self-monitoring, self-healing systems, which detect problems and continue to operate by fixing or simply bypassing malfunctions without human intervention. Although self-healing technology adds cost, the approach not only reduces potentially catastrophic delays or errors in critical systems but also saves money by reducing the need for IT department intervention. The article looks at the eLiza project and autonomic-computing projects from IBM including Active Memory system and Blue Gene project. The article also looks at ONE and N1 from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard's Superdome high-end Unix server and Blue Ocean Software's Track-It!.