This paper presents a component-based architecture for autonomous repair management in distributed systems, and a prototype implementation of this architecture, called JADE, which provides repair management for J2EE application server clusters. The JADE architecture features three major elements, which we believe to be of wide relevance for the construction of autonomic distributed systems: (1) a dynamically configurable, component-based structure that exploits the reflective features of the FRACTAL component model; (2) an explicit and configurable feedback control loop structure, that manifests the relationship between the managed system and repair management functions; (3) an original replication structure for the management subsystem itself which makes it fault-tolerant and self-healing.

Abstract Today, mobility and persistence are important aspects of distributed computing. They have many fields of use such as load balancing, fault tolerance and dynamic reconfiguration of applications. In this context, Java provides many useful mechanisms for the mobility of code via dynamic class loading, and the mobility or persistence of data via object serialization. However, Java does not provide any mechanism for the mobility/persistence of computation (i.e. threads). We designed and implemented a new mechanism, calledJava thread serialization, that is used to build thread mobility or thread persistence. Therefore, a running Java thread can, at an arbitrary state of its execution, migrate to a remote machine where it resumes its execution, or be checkpointed on disk for possible subsequent recovery. With our services, migrating a thread is simply performed by the call of ourgoprimitive, and checkpointing/recovering a thread is performed by the call of ourstoreandloadprimitives. Several projects have recently addressed the issue of Java thread serialization, e.g. Sumatra, Wasp, JavaGo, Brakes, JavaGoX, Merpati. Some of them have attempted to minimize the overhead incurred by the thread serialization mechanism on thread performance, but none of them has been able to completely avoid this overhead. We propose a generic Java thread serialization mechanism that does not impose any performance overhead on serialized threads. This is achieved thanks to the use of type inference and dynamic de‐optimization techniques. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation details of our thread serialization prototype in Sun Microsystems' JDK. We report on experiments conducted with our prototype, present a comparative performance evaluation of the main thread serialization techniques, and confirm the elimination of the performance overhead with our thread serialization mechanism. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The purpose of the Guide project is to explore the use of shared objects for communication in a distributed system, especially for applications that require cooperative work. Since 1986, two prototypes have been implemented respectively on top of Unix (Guide-1) and Mach 3.0 (Guide-2). They have been used for the development of distributed cooperative applications, allowing us to validate or reject many design choices in the system.

This paper describes the main design principles of the multiaccess system ESOPE. Emphasis is placed on basic ideas underlying the design rather than on implementation details. The main features of the system include the ability given to any user to schedule his own parallel processes, using system primitive operations, and the allocation/scheduling policy, which dynamically takes into account recent information about user behaviour.