Self-Organizing Systems

摘要

This issue of the Operating Systems Review focuses on self-organizing systems; that is, systems whose functionality emerges through the autonomous activities of their components. Self-organization is a powerful paradigm for structuring systems ranging from stand-alone operating systems all the way up to planetary-scale distributed systems. Unlike the previously dominant organizational paradigms, self-organization has the potential to be much more robust because the individual components can autonomously compensate for the failures of other components, to scale to much larger systems because they avoid centralized components that pose bottlenecks, and to provide much better performance because they draw on the resources of a great many components distributed in many different places.