This lecture introduces the concept of scalable and autonomic mechanisms that might support complex large-scale distributed systems.

To motivate the topic we look at some of the ambitious large-scale technologies people are hoping to build today.� The core of the first part of the lecture looks at an example from the US Air Force of a complex, modular, componentized system that would be distributed over huge networks and link all sorts of information sources in support of tactical decision making both in command centers and in the field.� The purpose is to give the students a glimpse of a large scale system that isn�t at all like the Akamai CDN or Amazon web datacenter�

Then we start to look at how hard it can be for a system like this to orchestrate reactions to faults in a coordinated way.� Drilling down, we run into problems with fault-handling and detection even in a trivial 2-process scenario!