2012-January 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 originally encompassed just the tools to manage virtual machines 
using Xen and QEMU, but has been merged with Zoni, which manages the 
physical aspects of a cluster like power control, network settings and 
handing out physical machines.

Development activities have included:-
        * Accounting server has been added to the codebase
	* Primitive scheduler changes
		* bug fixes
		* Add support for user choice of dense packing or not
		* Guard against starting more than one VM with
		  persistent disk
	* Client changes
		* Check syntax of user commands
		* Add support for querying available images
		* Add support for querying image size
		* Add support for copying of images
	* QEMU VMM changes
		* bug fixes
		* Reserve some memory for the host itself
		* Make scratch location configurable
		* Live migrations take a long time, eliminate
		  some timeout values
	* Cluster manager changes
		* bug fixes
		* Reduce network traffic
		* Move accounting functions to new accounting server
	* Branched off new stable version and release candidate
	* Audit compliance with Incubator policies

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 the United States.

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.
	* Develop community diversity (Committers currently at Telefonica,
          Google and CMU)