2011-April Tashi Incubator Status Report

Tashi has been incubating since September 2008.

The Tashi project aims to build a software infrastructure for cloud computing 
on massive internet-scale datasets (what we call Big Data). The idea is to 
build a cluster management system that enables the Big Data that are stored in 
a cluster/data center to be accessed, shared, manipulated, and computed on by 
remote users in a convenient, efficient, and safe manner.

Tashi has previously encompassed just the tools to manage virtual
machines using Xen and KVM, but is gaining the facility to hand out
physical machines as well.

Development activities have included:-
	* Importing bug fixes from CMU deployment
	* Don't display exceptions if failure is expected
	* Validate fields and clean invalid instance entries
	* Eliminating inconsistent state between node and cluster manager
	* Allow hosts to be soft powered off via ACPI
	* Refactor primitive scheduler to be less convoluted (ongoing)
	* Define a stable branch for tested code
	* Example support for dynamic scratch space disks
	* Enforce designated copy-on-write data filesystem for Qemu

The project is still working toward building a larger user and development 
community. User groups have been identified in Ireland, Slovenia and Korea,
as well as at Georgia Tech. CMU usage is growing as other groups hear about
the availability of the resource. Intel has restructured its research
division and folded some operations into adjoining academic sites. 

Items to be resolved before graduation:
	* A stable branch exists which could be a release candidate, but
          the codebase is large and test hardware is currently in
	  short supply. We are confident that the code in the stablefix
	  branch will work if running QEMU emulation, Pickle or sqlite
	  data storage, primitive scheduler. Xen, other data stores and
	  schedulers have not been tested recently.
	* Scratch space integration would be desirable, accounting
          integration is probably a necessity
	* Develop community diversity (Committers currently at Telefonica,
          Google and CMU)