Dreaming of Summer? Get Ready for Google Summer of Code!

It’s another year for big ideas in big data. Those ideas don’t just come from developers, but from the students they started out as – students like you.

We Want You
This summer, we invite you to continue along a journey we set out on last year, which marked our first as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code, a summer program hosted by Google that fosters the future of open source. This is very much in line with our efforts at HPCC Systems. We are coding fiends and we enable an entire community of developers that share our passion. It extends beyond that, though. We want to dig even deeper and start even earlier by empowering the developers of tomorrow with the tools needed to shape the future of big data. We’re offering you the opportunity to spend your summer coding and working toward advancements in big data, machine learning, data visualization and more.

The past 11 summers of GSoC have seen more than 50 million lines of code from more than 11,000 students worldwide. The benefits of participating in GSoC are plentiful, from improving and honing your programming skills to making connections that could land you a job. While studying computer science in school provides you with book smarts, programs like GSoC provide you with street smarts. You’ll receive one-on-one time with a mentor who will support you in coding projects. What might those look like?

See Something You Like?
Whether you’re a GSoC student or an intern, we have a number of projects ideas on the table right now. Check out the project types below, and let us know if there are any other areas of interest to you. We’re always open to ideas. It’s in our blood.

Machine Learning 

• Implement an approximate n-tile algorithm
• Implement a Gravitational Clustering module
• Implement Latent Semantic Analysis
• Implement the YinYang K Means algorithm

Web Interfaces

• Big Data and Geographical Mapping
• Cluster Deployment with Juju Charm
• ECL Debugger Front End (Web Based)
• Log Visualization Tool

Compiler Optimizations

• Implement a global sort and distribution optimiser
• Analysing workunit performance

Containerization

• HPCC Systems Dockerized and Kubernetes

File Transfer

• DFU Spray from zip/gzip files

Internet of Things

• Implement an IoT pluggable protocol for ROXIE

ECL Language Enhancements

• Provide unicode implementations for HPCC Systems standard library functions
• Implement character properties

Additional External Datastores in ECL

• Interfacing Ceph in to ECL
• Interfacing S3 in to ECL
• Interfacing your own suggested external datastore in to ECL

Additional Embedded Languages in ECL

• Interfacing MongoDB in to ECL
• Interfacing Scala in to ECL
• Interfacing Haskell in to ECL
• Interfacing Clojure in to ECL
• Interfacing SAS in to ECL
• Interfacing MatLab in to ECL
• Interfacing Couchbase in to ECL
• Interfacing Postgres in to ECL
• Interfacing MariaDB in to ECL
• Interfacing your own embedded language in to ECL

Not So Fast
Google has just opened the application period for organisations and we are working on ours now. The closing date is February 19th and HPCC Systems will be notified on February 29. Until then, visit our GSoC Forum to stay up to date on our participation: https://hpccsystems.com/bb/viewforum.php?f=51.

Our mentorship with students in 2015 saw many bright ideas come to light. If you have bright ideas of your own in big data, plan on pairing up with us come May.

If you have any questions or project ideas for GSoC, share them on the GSoC Forum page or reach out to our GSoC Organisation Administrator, Lorraine Chapman.