[infinispan-dev] Cloud-TM & Infinispan

[Paolo Romano]

Hi all,

I am new here, so let me first introduce myself. I am Paolo Romano, a 
researcher working at INESC-ID Lisbon, you can find more about me and my 
research activities at my webpage: http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~romanop.

I am posting to this mailing list to introduce the Cloud-TM project 
(http://www.cloudtm.eu), a EU funded project started in June which 
brings together Red Hat, INESC-ID Lisbon (http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt), 
Rome University "La Sapienza" (http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~hpdcs) and 
Algorithmica (http://www.algorithmica.it).

Citing the project's abstract:
"Cloud-TM aims at defining a novel programming paradigm to facilitate 
the development and administration of cloud applications. It will 
develop a Self-Optimizing Distributed Transactional Memory middleware 
that will spare programmers from the burden of coding for distribution, 
persistence and fault-tolerance, letting them focus on delivering 
differentiating business value. Further, the Cloud-TM platform aims at 
minimizing the operational costs of cloud applications, pursuing optimal 
efficiency via autonomic resource provisioning and pervasive self-tuning 
schemes."

Infinispan is expected to play a key role in Cloud-TM, as it has been 
chosen as the reference platform to integrate the main research results 
achieved during the project.  Specifically, our plan is to extend 
Infinispan along the following main directions:
1. Build a library of alternative replication mechanisms optimized for 
different workload scenarios (e.g. hi/low conflict rate, read/write 
intensive) and scales of the platform (e.g. few/many nodes, 
local/geographical distribution)
2. Developing self-scaling mechanisms aimed at elastically allocating 
nodes from Cloud computing platforms to Infinispan caches depending on 
the current workload.
3. Developing self-tuning mechanisms that will adaptively alter the data 
replication and distribution algorithms depending on the current 
workload characteristics and scale of the platform.
4. Providing programmers with a Distributed Software Transactional 
Memory interface via a wrapper over Infinispan. This wrapper would be 
close  in spirit to what  PojoCache is for TreeCache, though we are 
currently oriented towards using a Domain Modelling Language and a 
precompilation phase to generate the code to interact with Infinispan 
(along the lines of what is done in the Fenix framework, 
https://fenix-ashes.ist.utl.pt/trac/fenix-framework). Note that we are 
still at very early design phase, so we are open to ideas, comments and 
especially to learn from your experiences with PojoCache.

As developers of Infinispan, your feedback is extremely valuable to us. 
On one hand, as nobody better than you could provide us indications on 
how to fit within Infinispan's codebase any new experimental feature we 
will be developing in the least intrusive fashion. On the other hand, as 
you can help us to identify what are the most critical issues for 
realistic deployments of Infinispan in Cloud environments, pointing out, 
for instance, which ones, among the current Infinispan 
paramers/functionalities, would benefit the most from self-tuning 
approaches.

We have already started looking at the internal structure of the 
replication's modules of Infinispan, and in the next days we will be 
posting more about the kind of replication schemes (see point 1 above) 
we would like to integrate in Infinispan, and how we are planning to do so.
In the meanwhile, as a teaser :-), I am sending a reference to a couple 
of recent papers of ours if you are curious to know what kind of 
replication solutions we are currently working on:
- http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~romanop/files/papers/prdc09.pdf
- http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~romanop/files/papers/middleware10.pdf

Cheers,

    Paolo

-- 

Paolo Romano, PhD
Researcher at INESC-ID
Rua Alves Redol, 9
1000-059, Lisbon Portugal
Tel. + 351 21 3100300
Fax  + 351 21 3145843
Webpage http://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~romanop