"The award will fund research activities aiming to make significant contributions to the capacity planning and automation for monitoring tools by use of modeling, simulation, testbed emulation and on line optimization. Specific goals include:

– The establishment of an "On Demand software performance laboratory" at NC State
– The study of models, response surfaces and advanced simulation methods, and,
– The creation of an automated paradigm for on-line optimization for capacity tuning

Software performance, especially in emerging ubiquitous distributed and networked environments, is becoming one of the most relevant technical challenges. The ability to monitor the performance, to characterize the relavant metrics accurately and efficiently, and to tune the resources and parameters is becoming increasingly important.

The On Demand testbed and related activities will continue to grow and be expanded according to the evolving trends and therefore, should remain relevant and useful for a long time.

This project is expected to be the beginning of series of research projects between IBM and NC State that aim to develop a framework of solutions for providing software performance monitoring and tuning to the customers of the computing industry."