2011-October 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:-
	* Zoni has been merged into the mainline code trunk
        * Additional capability added to Zoni
        * Implement hint to influence scheduler packing policy
        * Reject incorrect arguments to tashi-client to prevent
          unintended defaults from being used
        * Migrated to rpyc version 3.1
        * Add "free capacity" info function to Tashi
	* Support for auto creation of zoni tftp boot menus
        * Fixed deadlocks in clustermanager
        * Rewrite CM to concentrate decay handlers into one spot
        * Use Linux LVM for local scratch space creation
        * VMM is now authoritative to what is running
        * Retry deploying held VMs at a later time

The project is still working toward building a larger user and development 
community. User groups have been identified in Ireland, Slovenia and Korea,
Malaysia, as well as at Georgia Tech.

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.
	* Should have example accounting code (data is kept, but
	  intepretation is currently manual)
	* Develop community diversity (Committers currently at Telefonica,
          Google and CMU)