APPLICATIONS

While many LSU students spent their summer vacations relaxing, taking exotic trips or catching up with summer school, LSU computer science student Michael Miceli spent Summer 2008 participating in the Google Summer of Code. LSU Department of Computer Science Professor Shantenu Jha, who holds a joint appointment with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, where Miceli is a student worker, mentored Miceli throughout this project, along with Hartmut Kaiser, Ph.D., a CCT research staff member. OMII-United Kingdom served as Miceli’s mentoring organization. Google accepts applications from graduate and undergraduate students around the world for Summer of Code. The students propose projects that involve writing open source code, and mentoring organizations or professors support the students in requesting funding for their projects. Google funded nearly 1,000 projects for summer 2008, including Miceli’s. The participating students worked from the end of May through the beginning of September writing their codes. Through his work at the CCT, Miceli designs applications for the Simple API for Grid Applications, or SAGA, software program, which Jha works on at CCT. SAGA provides an open-source interface so more people can take advantage of Grid computing, which links many computing systems together, allowing researchers to access more power and solve complex problems faster than working on one computer alone. Through Google Summer of Code, Miceli extended his work at the CCT, and wrote an open source implementation of MapReduce using SAGA. MapReduce is a program in which users employ a mapping technique to analyze and generate large amounts of data, and these projects can run more efficiently if users are able to access Grid computing through SAGA. Miceli’s code will aid users in this process. Throughout the summer, Miceli communicated with Google and other students on the project through a Summer of Code mailing list to update them on his progress. At the end of summer, Miceli posted his code on code.gooogle.com. “It is certainly an honor to have one of our students selected from among an international pool of recipients for this summer experience,” Jha said. “This also gave Michael a chance to expand on his CCT work and collaborate with peers from around the world, which gives him information and ideas he can draw on throughout his undergraduate career here at LSU.” For more information on Google Summer of Code, please visit its Web site.