Great stuff, Paolo.  I tend to follow this moving forward.  It sounds like you'll need compute cloud provisioning to handle constructing and changing the topology for scale reasons or otherwise.  Moreover, you mentioned geography, something we've been investigating.  Have a look at the below, and feel free to ping us for help as you move this forward.

http://code.google.com/p/jclouds/wiki/ComputeGuide

Cheers,
-Adrian
founder jclouds

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 7:18 PM, Paolo Romano <romanop@gsd.inesc-id.pt> wrote:

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
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