Hi Avery, clusterlib looks like some great functionality, I don't see
why we couldn't include it as a subproject (see one caveat I noticed
below). I'd also like to point out that incubator is also a great
option for the project. http://incubator.apache.org/ , have you
considered that?

According to the readme on GH a dependency exists on "libmicrohttpd"
which is LGPL licensed. Unfortunately we (apache projects) cannot
include LGPL licensed code, see "category X" here
http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html This dependency would have to
be removed prior to adding the subproject.

Regards,

Patrick

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Avery Ching <ach...@yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> Sorry for the delay (meetings). I just threw it up on GitHub.
>
> https://github.com/aching/Clusterlib
>
> Enjoy!
>
> Avery
>
> On Jan 11, 2011, at 3:42 PM, Fournier, Camille F. [Tech] wrote:
>
>> Is the code somewhere we can look at it right now?
>>
>> C
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Avery Ching [mailto:ach...@yahoo-inc.com]
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 2:02 PM
>> To: dev@zookeeper.apache.org
>> Subject: Discussion - Clusterlib as a subproject for ZooKeeper
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> We have been working on Clusterlib at Yahoo! and would like to contribute it 
>> as a subproject to ZooKeeper.  Clusterlib was developed as a next-generation 
>> platform for creating/coordinating search applications/services (including 
>> crawling, processing, indexing, and front end) at Yahoo!.  We suspect much 
>> of this work will be useful for others trying to build up 
>> large-scale/distributed applications that would like to coordinate and share 
>> the same semantics.
>>
>> Here is a (relatively) short summary of why Clusterlib was developed:
>>
>> Large-scale distributed applications are difficult and time-consuming to 
>> develop since a great deal of effort is spent solving the same
>> challenges (consistency, fault-tolerance, naming problems, etc.).  
>> Additionally, coordinating these applications is typically ad-hoc and
>> hard to maintain.  Clusterlib fills the gap by providing distributed 
>> application developers with an object-oriented data model,
>> asynchronous event handling system, well-defined consistency semantics, and 
>> methods for making coordination easy across
>> cooperating applications.  Some example applications might include a search 
>> engine, scalable file system, large-scale data cache, etc.
>>
>> Clusterlib is a middleware library for building distributed applications. It 
>> was designed to simplify the job of application developers and provides a 
>> set of distributed objects that all inherit from the same Notifyable 
>> interface. The set of distributed objects includes: Root, Application, 
>> Group, DataDistribution, Node, ProcessSlot, PropertyList, and Queue. In 
>> order to give context, each object is described briefly.
>>
>> * Root is a point-of-entry object at the top of the hierarchy in Clusterlib 
>> and manages its Applications. There is only one Root per Clusterlib instance.
>> * Applications are used as a namespace for managing Groups, Nodes, 
>> DataDistributions, Queues, and PropertyLists in a user-defined application. 
>> Using the application concept (as opposed to only having groups) makes 
>> accessing another Application's child objects explicit to developers.
>> * Groups are a logical association of Clusterlib objects that can be nested. 
>> Since large-scale applications often require hundreds or thousands of nodes 
>> to operate, there might a "node" Group that has an "alive" child Group and a 
>> "dead" child Group that are each populated with their respective sets of 
>> nodes.
>> * DataDistributions balance load and data across a set of objects. 
>> DataDistributions provide user-extensible key hashing to variable-sized hash 
>> ranges for user flexibility.
>> * Nodes typically represent a physical or virtual node in an application. It 
>> has child ProcessSlots that can be used to reserve system resources.
>> * ProcessSlots maintain an actual process running locally on the physical 
>> machine. It can also contain other information about the process, such as a 
>> PID or port array.
>> * PropertyLists may be created and maintained as a child of any Notifyable 
>> object. It is basically a key-value storage that can, for instance, be used 
>> to determine how long a timeout would be on a particular server or the 
>> number of retries to allow before giving up. PropertyLists are leafs in the 
>> Clusterlib hierarchy and cannot have any children.
>> * Queues are distributed FIFO queues. They can be used to synchronize 
>> threads, pass messages between threads, and for JSON-RPC.
>>
>> Clusterlib objects are composed in a hierarchy and maintain ACID compliance. 
>> Distributed, non-blocking, fault-tolerant locks can be acquired on any 
>> Clusterlib object and asynchronous event handlers can be registered for 
>> object-specific changes. For example, if a ProcessSlot changed, an 
>> asynchronous event handler might check to see if the process is still 
>> running and if not, try to restart it. There are 3 types of 
>> Clusterlib-defined locks (child, notifyable, and ownership). Clusterlib 
>> internally uses a child lock on a parent object to access child objects, 
>> however users may also use this lock if desired. A notifyable lock is 
>> intended as a general-purpose lock on a Notifyable. Finally, ownership locks 
>> are intended to express concepts suchs as "leadership" in a Group or 
>> "reservation" of a Node. In order to allow more parallelism, Clusterlib 
>> locks can be accessed in shared or exclusive modes.
>>
>> Since Clusterlib relies upon Zookeeper as a fault-tolerant, consensus 
>> service, it inherits many of its performance and fault-tolerance properties. 
>> As the number of Zookeeper servers increases, read performance scales up 
>> nearly linearly, however write performance scales inversely due to 
>> Zookeeper's internal atomic broadcast protocol. As long as the number of 
>> correctly functioning Zookeeper servers maintains a quorum, Zookeeper can 
>> continue to operate. The same is true for Clusterlib applications. The locks 
>> and leadership election algorithms in Clusterlib are fault-tolerant to 
>> client failure due to the use of Zookeeper ephemeral nodes.
>>
>> In addition to being a library, Clusterlib comes with a http server to 
>> viewing/manipulating Clusterlib objects and/or ZooKeeper znodes directly.  
>> I've linked some PNGs to illustrate this.  It also is bundled with a CLI 
>> that is extensible.  We have also developed a suite of over 90 unittests 
>> that simulate distributed event ordering using MPI to test for many of those 
>> hard-to-find distributed bugs.  It's been tested to build on flavors of 
>> Redhat Linux, Ubuntu Linux, and OSX.
>>
>> We would like to see it as a subproject of ZooKeeper because its tightly 
>> integrated with ZooKeeper. What do folks think about Clusterlib as a 
>> subproject of ZooKeeper?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Avery
>>
>> Clusterlib-UI snapshot link
>> http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~aching/clusterlib-ui.png
>>
>> ZooKeeper-UI snapshot link
>> http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~aching/zookeeper-ui.png
>>
>>
>
>

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