US Patent 7870568 Adaptive shared computing infrastructure for application server-based deployments

An adaptive system for dynamically provisioning a shared computing infrastructure among a plurality of software applications and a plurality of types of software application servers providing run-time environments for the software applications. The system includes computing engines assigned to execute instances of the software applications, clients accessing the computing engines to request and receive services from the software applications, and a broker device that dynamically allocates engines domains for executing the software applications. The broker device includes an optimization module for allocating the computing engines to the domains, and a configuration manager for configuring the engines. The configuration manager reconfigures a computing engine by halting a current instance of a first software application, and by loading and starting an instance of a second software application. The system is capable of reconfiguring software applications running in environments provided by different types of software application servers.