2012-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 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.

Activities July-October:

In the period from July to October, the project did not ask to make 
another incubating release, but is ready to start the process for a new 
release incorporating the development efforts of the last 6 months.

Development efforts this period have included providing a separate 
administration client, allowing addition of users and networks, and host 
reservations and availability for scheduling.

The project has received code contributions from one non-committer in 
this period. Diogo Gomes provided support for deriving the IP addresses 
of guests automatically, without having to scan the subnet. Thanks Diogo!

Additional stability and user experience improvements were also 
committed.

Upcoming software goals are to investigate what is needed to support 
IPv6, replace RPyC, and to provide the ability to hand out server slices 
(operating system level virtualization). Besides CPU and memory, disk 
storage should also be a schedulable resource.

The project has a user community, but it is small. Growth mostly has 
happened by word of mouth. To show potential users at large the utility 
of this project, the author of this report is creating web pages to 
demonstrate how to accomplish distributed computing tasks. Base images 
of (free) OS installs will be provided to allow new users to get started 
quickly. Hopefully this will increase visibility of the project.

Items to be resolved before graduation:
	* Generate more publicity for the project.
	* Develop members of the user community to submit feature
	  extensions.