I was trying to find out if there is a way to create a group of nodes so that they are distributed across all locations:
//It would be helpful if there was a parameter to the function call that would give
//a hint to allocate nodes across all AZs or an option through the template
groupNodes = computeService.createNodesInGroup("mygroup", 2, template);
This would be a nice feature for a cloud developer to ensure he has some nodes in each AZ to make his application continue to run even if a single AZ goes down.
Short answer: No.
While I understand what you're getting at. Practically speaking, you typically need to know where your instances are starting so you can get a location and id to refer to them later. If you'd like to discuss it further, I invite you over to the jclouds-dev group.