The autonomic operating system research project: achievements and future directions

Traditionally, hypervisors, operating systems, and runtime systems have been providing an abstraction layer over the bare-metal hardware. Traditional abstractions, however, do not consider for non-functional requirements such as system-level constraints or users' objectives. As these requirements are gaining increasing importance, researchers are looking into making user-specified and system-level objectives first-class citizens in the computer systems' realm. This paper describes the Autonomic Operating System (AcOS) project; AcOS enhances commodity operating systems with an autonomic layer that enables self-* properties through adaptive resource allocation. With AcOS, we investigate intelligent resource allocation to achieve user-specified service-level objectives on application performance and to respect system-level thresholds on CPU temperature. We give a broad overview of AcOS, elaborate on its achievements, and discuss research perspectives.