Persistent Computing Systems as an Infrastructure of Computing Anticipatory Systems

The notion of anticipatory system, in particular, computing anticipatory system, implies a fundamental assumption or requirement, i.e., to be anticipatory, a computing system must behave continuously and persistently without stopping its running. However, the requirement that a computing system should run continuously and persistently is never taken into account as an essential or general requirement by traditional system design and development methodologies. As a result, a traditional computing system often has to stop its running and service when it needs to be maintained, upgraded or reconfigured, it has some trouble, or it is attacked. From the viewpoints of anticipatory computing and persistent computing, this paper shows that a new type of computing systems, named "persistent computing systems", is indispensable to design and development of true computing anticipatory systems. The paper also discusses how persistent computing systems can be constructed by soft system bus technology, and present some new scientific and technical challenges on anticipatory computing and persistent computing.