Open Source: the next generation

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The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global programme that pays students to write code for open-source projects over their summer holidays. Since its inception in 2005, the programme has brought together nearly 5000 students and mentors from 98 countries – all for the love of open-source code. For the second-year running, OMII-UK has been selected to participate as a mentoring organisation.

One of the most successful of OMII-UK’s GSoC students from last year was Michael Micelli, an undergraduate student from Louisiana State University. Michael took MapReduce, a programming model used to perform data processing on large clusters, and made it available to run through SAGA – OMII-UK’s programming interface for Grid resources. ‘[Michael’s work] was a very important proof of concept which showed that SAGA has the correct specificity to work with a number of applications’ said Shantenu Jha, Michael’s project mentor and head of the SAGA project. It appears that the reviewing panel for CCGrid thought so too, as they published two of Michael’s papers on the subject.

GSoC is a win-win situation for the open-source community. For the mentors, the benefit comes from training the next generation of developers, as described by Shantenu ‘Training people is the most important requirement for any successful project, so the GSoC is exceptionally useful’. The students get to partake in a real project, developing code that will be used by the open-source community. ‘It was a great experience overall’ says Micheal ‘I wrote an application from scratch, and developed it all the way to a working state’. They also get to meet a wide group of student developers and work with some of the leading figures in the open-source world ‘Working with Shantenu was great’ says Micheal, ‘he helps you to do things that you couldn’t normally do’.

This year, the interest in GSoC has continued. There have been several thousand hits on OMII-UK’s GSoC webpage and we’ve managed to attract roughly the same number of students as last year – even though the application process for students has become more involved. We look forward to the output from this year’s students and we hope that they will all be as successful as Michael.

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