Autonomic Web-based Simulation

Many scientific and engineering simulations are large programs which despite careful debugging and testing will probably contain errors when deployed to the Web for use. Based on the assumption that such scientific and engineering simulations do contain errors and that the underlying computing systems do fail due to hardware or software errors, we present a framework called autonomic web-based simulation (AWS), a supporting data warehouse, and their implementations to develop and deploy reliable web-based simulations. AWS strives to achieve the following features presented in the Vision of Autonomic Computing: self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing and self-protecting. We discuss mathematical models to simulate the execution of scientific simulations and formulate objective functions for the purpose of determining optimal checkpoint intervals. Checkpointing is a basic requirement for self-healing of AWS and determining optimal checkpoint interval helps achieve self-optimizing of AWS. A novel three step data cleansing algorithm is designed through approximate string joins. A self-manageable system is implemented for the NOM simulation project which allows scientists and other end users run NOM simulations anytime from anywhere.