Panel: Biologically Inspired Software

In October, 2001, IBM released a manifesto [1] that defined autonomic computing, a new approach to coping with the rapidly growing complexity of integrating, configuring and operating computing systems. This article elaborates further on IBM’s vision of autonomic computing. We speculate about general architectural features that might typify autonomic, or self-managing, systems of the future, and use this as a basis for discussing several challenging scientific and engineering issues that need to be addressed in order to realize this vision. Our goal is to motivate the academic and industrial research communities to address these fundamental problems.