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Project Ideas for PSU Summer of Code 2008

Here’s a list of project ideas, based strongly on last year’s list, which seemed to work out pretty well. Do remember, though, that we are really flexible in what we’ll consider…

Here are some of the project areas that are known to be fertile ground. This list isn’t limiting, but contains some good space to search for ideas:

  • Projects for my PSU CS 410/510 Open Source Software Development class. I’m not certain this course will run this Summer, but potential students and others may want to look at past course projects there for ideas.
  • Projects related to the various groups I’m involved with. There are a lot of these, and they can all use help. Examples include:
    • Portland State Aerospace Society, open hardware/software amateur sounding rockets.
    • This year, X.org/freedesktop.org once again has their own Summer of Code projects. I would suggest that you start there with X Window System stuff, including XCB and Cairo. I will try to coordinate with the X folks on getting a good mentor for projects related to our joint interests.
    • The Nickle programming language.
    • A project on applications of open Software-Defined Radio.

  • Projects related to the various courses I teach.

  • Projects in and around open source database technologies. Prof. Len Shapiro is interested in mentoring projects in database research and development.

    • I’d like to make greater use of PostgreSQL in my teaching. Here are some example projects. After each one is my ranking (1=most valuable):
      • Display plans considered by the optimizer, so the viewer could better understand Pat Selinger’s dynamic programming optimization algorithm. (1)
      • Show how the costs displayed by EXPLAIN were computed. (2)
      • Display buffer page residence according to what files/indexes/tempfiles the pages came from. (3)
      • EXPLAIN ANALYZE displays the time in milliseconds used by each operator. It would be useful to estimate the physical I/Os used by each operator (2) or how the size of operator outputs differed from the optimizer’s estimate (3).
    • Last summer two of my students added a patch to PostgreSQL. I have some ideas about how it could be improved, but I’ll let you come up with your own.
    • A look at my publications (www.cs.pdx.edu/~len ) may give you some ideas of the kinds of work I would be happy to mentor.

  • See our open source page for more on these topics and others.

  • Excelsior!

I hope these ideas help spark your interest.