The goal of autonomic computing, is to build systems and applications which manage themselves by responding to the data. They configure and adapt themselves in real time, analogous to the structure of a self-regulating biological ecosystem.
Today there are many applications of autonomic computing. In a lecture given during the EGEE 5th User Forum, Manish Parashar, the founding director of the Center for Autonomic Computing and The Applied Software Systems Laboratory at Rutgers University, said that this approach can also be applied to complex grid infrastructures which are similarly complex, and becoming so intricate that they are not achieving their full potential.