Bernstein and Kintala argue for “software rejuvenation”

HOBOKEN, N.J. — Professors Lawrence Bernstein and Dr. Chandra M.R. Kintala of Stevens Institute of Technology have published an article in the August number of “Crosstalk – The Journal of Defense Software Engineering,” arguing for a concept they call “software rejuvenation.”

“Software rejuvenation,” says Bernstein, “is a periodic, preemptive restart of a running system at a clean, internal state to prevent future failures. It was used in systems ranging from a Lucent billing system to NASA’s long-duration space mission to Pluto. It’s also implemented in IBM’s Netfinity resource manager. It’s one aspect of self-healing systems.”

In 1990, Professor Bernstein, then a project director at Bell Labs, observed that faults/bugs, when triggered in software, do not always immediately cause failures/crashes, but take the system into a state where it begins to decay. This decay has symptoms of memory leakage, broken pointers, unreleased file locks, and numerical error accumulation, among other manifestations. These amount to a gradual degradation in availability of service and data quality, eventually leading to a failure/crash.

Based on this observation, a new method to enhance the dependability of a software system – software rejuvenation – was introduced in 1995 by Kintala and his colleagues at Bell Labs.

“Software rejuvenation is as intuitive as occasionally rebooting your PC,” says Kintala, “except that it was never defined, implemented, modeled and analyzed for software systems before 1995.”

Bernstein maintains that interesting future research directions for software rejuvenation and self-healing are large-scale networked systems built with commercial off-the-shelf components and open interfaces.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.  

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