Google is going to pay students $4,500 to work on some of the coolest open source projects. The OSU OSL is a organization for Google Summer of Code 2009. After reviewing some great proposals we’ve made our selections. Here are the students and the projects they proposed.
Pydra
Pydra is a distributed computing or cluster computing framework for Python. Pydra seeks to provide a framework that is easy to deploy, manage, use. This is on top of providing standard features such as fault tolerance. There are two students working on Pydra for Summer of Code 2009.
MapReduce
Jakub Łukasz Gustak is a 5th year student of graduate studies at Wrocław University of Technology (Poland), Computer Science major. Recently interested in concurrent, parallel and distributed programming and languages. Also interested in programming languages design and its expressiveness. His master thesis is addressing problems of parallel and distributed computation (title: Parallelization in Scheme language).
Jakub’s project is to implement MapReduce support for Pydra. MapReduce is a concept for simplifying parallel computing jobs. Jakub will also be implementing input/output helpers, improved WorkUnit Slicing, and other features.
Task Scheduler and Management
Yin Qiu is a first year master student from Nanjing University, China, majoring in software engineering. He interned at IBM China Development Lab for 6 months, and at Microsoft Research Asia for another 4 months. He has over 5 years of experience in Java and 2 years of experience in Python. In 2007. Yin is passionate about building distributed systems.
Yin’s project is to implement a Task Scheduler for assigning workunits to workers and managing workers within a Pydra cluster. He will also be implementing and improving management for task objects.
Unify
Luis Arajo has been a Gentoo developer since the beginning of 2005 , being part of the Haskell and Scheme team. He also cooperates with many packages inside the dev-lang/ category and is the current leader of the Gentoo-GUIs sub-project. Luis also
successfully participated on the Google Summer of Code of 2007 developing a graphical framework for the Gentoo project, and in Google Summer of Code of 2008 designing and implementing the Unify project.
Luis will be continuing his work on the Unify Project. Unify is a tool for creating packages across different distribution formats (deb , rpm, solaris packages) using standard portage Gentoo ebuilds as the specification for building the packages. Luis will be continuing work on features and improving the usability of the application.
Android IRC
Tianyi Gao is a first-year college student with a 3.94 GPA, triple majoring in Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Mathematics at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, and hopefully graduating in three years with the class of 2011. He’s been programming for six years, with three years of Java experience
Tianyi will be implementing an IRC client for the Android mobile operating system. Our IRC client will differ from existing IRC clients for android in that it will utilize a proxy service to keep connections alive even when the client is not running. This model will allow connections to be maintained but preseve battery life by only using data connections while the application is in the foreground.