Paul Anderson (University of Edinburgh) is going to present an overview of his current research work.

Speaker: Paul Anderson

  • Date: December 9th, 2011 (Friday)
  • Room: CIT 368 (note room change)
  • Host: Shriram Krishnamurthi
  • Title: "Intelligent Configuration"
  • Abstract
Automated tools such as Puppet, cfengine, and LCFG are now the norm for managing the configuration of large computing infrastructures. These largely solve the problem of reliably deploying complex configurations, and significantly reduce the risk of low-level configuration errors. However, this highlights a number of higher-level problems: how do we create a configuration specification to meet certain requirements?  How do we create a specification which can take account of autonomic changes? How do we maintain service while migrating reliably from one configuration to another? I will explain the background to these problems, and look at some solutions we are developing, based on techniques from intelligent systems, including constraint-based specifications, and automated planning. I will then talk about some current work using agent-based technologies to provide a more devolved approach to configuration and planning decisions.  

Paul Anderson has a background in the practical configuration and management of large computing infrastructures. He worked on the configuration of the European Datagrid, he is the author of the LCFG configuration tool, and has been a longtime contributor to the LISA conferences and workshops. Paul is currently a member of the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications, in the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University, where he is interested in applying intelligent systems techniques to the problems of systems configuration.