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Modern compute systems continue to evolve towards increasingly complex, heterogeneous and distributed architectures. At the same time, functionality and performance are no longer the only aspects when developing applications for such systems, and additional concerns such as flexibility, power efficiency, resource usage, reliability and cost are becoming increasingly important. This does not only raise the question of how to efficiently develop applications for such systems, but also how to cope with dynamic changes in the application behaviour or the system environment. The EPiCS Project aims to address these aspects through exploring self-awareness and self-expression. Self-awareness allows systems and applications to gather and maintain information about their current state and environment, and reason about their behaviour. Self-expression enables systems to adapt their behaviour autonomously to changing conditions. Innovations in EPiCS are based on systematic integration of research in concepts and foundations, customisable hardware/software platforms and operating systems, and self-aware networking and middleware infrastructure. The developed technologies are validated in three application domains: computational finance, distributed smart cameras and interactive mobile media systems.

Service providers often use service level agreements (SLAs) to assure potential users of their services about the QoS to expect when they subscribe. In the cloud computing model, providers are required to continuously meet their SLA claims in the face of unanticipated failure of cloud resources. The dynamics of the cloud environment as attributed to its unpredictable mode of use and elasticity of its resources make human-driven solutions inefficient or sometimes infeasible. On the other hand, self-managed architectures have increasingly matured in their capacity to coordinate environments predominated by uncertainties. Thus making them a right fit for managing cloud-based systems. However, given the massive resource pool of the cloud, state-of-the-art centralised self-managed architectures are not scalable and are inherently brittle. Therefore, we propose a decentralised resource control mechanism which meets the unique robustness, scalability and resilience requirements of the cloud. The design of the mechanism gains inspiration from market control theory and a novel use of reputation metrics. In addition, an innovative self-managed cloud architecture has been designed based on the control mechanism. Early results from simulation studies show that the approach is feasible at reducing the SLA violations incurred by cloud providers.