Google Summer of Code Project Ideas

This is the main page for OMII-UK's involvement in Google Summer of Code. We have been chosen to be one of the 2009 mentoring organisations and we were also a 2008 mentoring organisation. On this page you can find out more about possible project ideas, and why you might want to work on them. We work with some of the leading researchers in many fields, so you have a chance to contribute to the software that is used by them!

Introduction

OMII-UK is an organisation which develops and supports a wide range of different open-source software components, primarily to facilitate research. Some of the software includes Taverna for building and enacting scientific workflows, which is used by thousands of people internationally; the OGSA-DAI data access and integration framework, which allows "virtual data warehousing"; GridSAM a standards compliant component for job submission and monitoring, e.g. to do computational simulation; PAG and AVATS (VIC and RAT) are all concerned with videoconferencing over the internet.

For a full list of software we have released check out the catalogue. To read how OMII-UK software has been used you can look at the following success stories or to see how individual components are being used: OGSA-DAI.

Submitting a Project Idea

If you are an existing OMII-UK component provider and have some interesting piece of work that might be of interest to a student then, if you are a contributor (e.g. a Commissioned Software Project person) then you can also add the idea to this page directly, using the following template, or could you email info@omii.ac.uk. You should try to provide the following information:

• The OMII-UK component or components this project relates to.
• A project description consisting of one or two paragraph describing the project goals (this does not need to completely specify the project, just give prospective students an outline of what is required). Ideas may also be "blue-sky" - these usually lead to the most interesting projects.
• Any links to Websites or papers related to this project.
• Specifying the student skill set required to do this project, e.g. programming languages, is important.
• Each project must have a mentor. The mentor is in charge of supervising students, tracking their progress, answering questions about the project, etc. If you would like to be the mentor for this project, please include your name and e-mail address here. If not, please leave this field blank, and we will assign a mentor from the mentor pool. Note that at least one of the montors need to have a google account.

If you are a prospective student and would like to submit your own idea, you should get in touch with us at info@omii.ac.uk. You should consider:

• How will your idea benefit the existing OMII-UK community?
• Is your project feasible given the amount of time available?
• Which software components is your idea related to?
• What skills will be required?
• How will you facilitate your work being easy to support after GSOC has finished?
• Do you have an idea of who would be the best person to mentor you? (this is optional)

2009 Project Ideas

These were the project ideas suggested for the GSoC 2009.

• Generating User Interfaces to the Cloud (Rapid; Java, XML)
• Command line tool use in Taverna (Java, Maven, SVN)
• Novel GUI for Taverna workflow creation (Java, Maven, SVN)
• JDK 6 scripting plugin for Taverna (Java, Maven, SVN)
• Biocep R/Taverna/myExperiment integration (Java, Maven, Ruby, SVN, REST)
• Managing Applications Across Clouds (Medium to Advanced C++)
• Advanced Data Management Capabilities Using MapReduce (SAGA,MapReduce)
• Extending OGSA-DAI's Grid Compute and Data Capabilities via SAGA (Java, SAGA, OSGA-DAI)
• Distributed Computation and Visualization of Biological Data Using SAGA and RAVE (C++,Java)
• Design and implement a fast and scalable backend to SAGA's Advert API package (Networking)
• Backport SAGA-C++ to boost-1.33, and create binary SAGA distributions (deb, rpm, ...) (Linux, C++)
• DIASER - A Distributed Internet Archive System for Educational Repositories (Linux,Shell,Perl,Networking, HTML)
• Adaptive Cost Estimation Techniques for OGSA-DAI DQP (Java, RDBMS)

Projects and Students from 2009

A list of the students and projects selected for 2009 is available here. A summary of our participation in GSoC09 is available here.

2008 Project Ideas

The following OMII-UK related ideas were submitted (along with the software they apply to and the skills they require) for GSoC 2008.

• Drag-and-drop Compute Job Submissions (C).
• Generating Graphical User Interfaces for Grid Computing Portals (RAPID; Java, XML).
• OGSA-DAI Visual Work Flow Editor (OGSA-DAI; Java).
• SIP enabled RAT/VIC (RAT, VIC; C, C++, Tcl/Tk).
• Integrate NAT traversal into RAT/VIC (RAT, VIC; C, C++, Tcl/Tk).
• Integrate latest IETF features in UCL Common multimedia library (RAT, VIC; C).
• Provide Pulse Audio support for RAT (RAT; C).
• Integrate Echo Cancellation into RAT (RAT; C, Tcl/Tk).
• Convert RAT to use multithreading and non-local MBUS (RAT; C, Tcl/Tk).
• Taverna and Grimoires Integration (Taverna, Grimoires; Java).
• Exposing the Power of Google through SAGA (C++ or Java).
• Extending Taverna to integrate MatLab (Taverna, MatLab; Java).
• AJAX based Workflow Editor (Taverna; Java, Javascript, AJAX).
• Apache Commons VFS Extensions for Grids (Commons VFS; Java).
• GridSAM on a Cloud (GridSAM; Java).
• Utility Job Submission (GridSAM; Java).
• Parameter Sweep Jobs (GridSAM; Java, Groovy, XPath).
• Internal MyProxy in GridSAM (GridSAM; Java).
• Automatic workflow Generation for GridSAM (GridSAM; Java).

Projects and Students from 2008

A list of the students and projects selected for 2008 is available here. An OMII-UK Newsletter article summarised the OMII-UK outcomes for GSoC08.