Automatic Configuration and Run-time Adaptation of Distributed Applications

Current technology trends point towards both an increased heterogeneity in hardware platforms and an increase in the mechanisms available to applications for controlling how these platforms are utilized. These trends motivate the design of resource-aware distributed applications, which proactively monitor and control utilization of the underlying platform, ensuring a desired performance level by adapting their behavior to changing resource characteristics. This paper describes a general framework for enabling application adaptation on distributed platforms. The framework combines programmer specification of alternate execution behaviors (configurations) with automatic support for deciding when and how to adapt, relying extensively on two components: (1) profile-based modeling of application behavior, automatically generated by measuring application performance in a virtual execution environment with controllable resource consumption, and (2) application-specific continuous monitoring of current resource characteristics. The latter detects when application configurations need to change while the former guides the selection of a new configuration. We evaluate these framework components using an interactive image visualization application. Our results demonstrate that starting from a natural specification of alternate application behaviors and an automatically generated performance database, our framework permits the application to both configure itself in diverse distributed environments and adapt itself to run-time changes in resource characteristics so as to satisfy user preferences of output quality.