An Approach to Immunity-Based Performance Monitoring and Evaluation for Computing Systems

Simulating biological immune mechanism to implement performance monitoring and evaluation of computing systems is a new research approach for the distributed high performance computing environment. First, to simulate the biological immune mechanisms, the immune process's characteristics and computing system's rejuvenation are analyzed and compared. Second, to monitor and diagnose performance degradation, the logical and mathematical models of system rejuvenation are set up, which use an extension of the standard?proc performance interface offered by Linux systems to collect resource information form both local and remote hosts, then the principle of self-nonself discrimination inspired by immunology to diagnose system performance. On the basis of both the logical and mathematical model, an application regarding audio-video resource transaction process system as background is studied, a two-stage hyper-exponential model is proposed to evaluate system performance, and the effect imposed by a performance monitoring agent is evaluated. The results of experiments and case study indicate that this method is effective and feasible to monitor and evaluate the performance of a distributed computing system.