Tomorrow's computers will fix their own glitches
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Computer, heal thyself.
Associated Press
Long a dream of science fiction writers and anyone who has encountered a sick machine, the idea of self-maintaining, auto-administering and failproof hardware may not be too far off.
Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM vice president of technology, unveils the company's plans to develop computer systems that can manage themselves like living organisms.
International Business Machines Corp. yesterday unveiled plans to focus research and considerable money toward developing an e-business server that monitors itself for problems and can fix itself.
The company will devote 25 percent of its research and development budget for servers toward the project named eLiza — an amount that will run in the billions of dollars over several years.
"We think this is a really important problem," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technology and strategy. The company says the project is one of the most ambitious in the company's history.
IBM isn't alone in trying to make servers both more trustworthy and affordable. Earlier this year, NASA and high-tech companies formed a consortium to study the reliability of high-performance computers. That's in addition to the work of the military and individual businesses, including IBM.
Big Blue's latest efforts are concentrated on machines that serve up massive amounts of data for companies — computers that are hundreds of times more powerful than those in existence today.
The machines will configure themselves by installing new operating system software and data automatically. They also will be better equipped to balance loads.
Most importantly, Wladawsky-Berger said, the machines will be so simple that they will be no more difficult to operate than a kitchen appliance.
That should reduce the need for highly skilled workers, increasingly in short supply.
