OSDL to Mentor Four Students in this Year’s Google Summer of Code Program

BEAVERTON, Ore., June 13, 2006 – The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux® and open source software, today announced it will mentor four students in Google’s 2006 Summer of Code program.

“Providing mentors for Google's Summer of Code program fits hand in hand with OSDL's mission to increase adoption of Linux and open source software through collaboration with the community and industry,” said Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. “By providing guidance to students, we can expose them to a fulfilling career path and help them to have a real impact on solving challenges that will drive the use of Linux and open source software throughout the globe.”

The Google Summer of Code program was launched in 2005 to encourage students from around the world to expand their knowledge of open source software development with hands-on experience. In the program, student developers are provided with a stipend so they can spend the summer months creating new open source software or helping develop currently established projects. The program's goals are to inspire young open source developers, to provide students with an opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits, and to support existing open source projects and organizations.

"OSDL is a natural mentor for students in Google’s Summer of Code program,” said Chris DiBona, open source program manager, Google. “Students working with OSDL will get some great experience working in the Linux kernel community—experience that they'll be able to apply in the development of future open source projects.”

The students working with OSDL this summer come from Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil), the Indian Institute of Technology (New Delhi), University of the Philippines and the University of Zagreb (Croatia). OSDL mentors include Kees Cook, Bryce Harrington, Steve Hemminger and Mark Wong.

The specific projects include:

• NSFv4 Fault Recovery Experimentation: Dipankar Sarkar, Indian Institute of Technology; Bryce Harrington, OSDL mentor

This project will focus on evaluating the recent NFSv4 improvements and is expected to help lead to widespread adoption of NFS.

• Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol: Mario Kozina, University of Zagreb; Steve Hemminger, OSDL mentor

This assignment will help transition the Linux Ethernet Bridging project from a kernel implementation of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to a new user space implementation of the Protocol. The project is expected to increase the maintainability of the code and to benefit its virtualization capabilities.

• SendPage Enhancements: Anton Elaph, University of the Philippines; Kees Cook, OSDL mentor

The focus for this project will be on increasing the reliability and responsiveness of the SendPage program and to keep the program up to date.

• TBC-E Fair-use for PostgreSQL: Rilson Nascimento, Federal University of Pernambuco; Mark Wong, OSDL mentor

The main goal of this project is to build a fair-use implementation of the TPC-E benchmark for PostgreSQL. TPC-E is the new Online Transaction Processing workload being developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC).

About Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)

OSDL – sponsor of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel - is dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux-based operating systems in the enterprise. Founded in 2000 and supported by a global consortium of major Linux customers and IT industry leaders, OSDL is a nonprofit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and test facilities available to developers around the world. With offices in China, Europe, Japan and the United States, OSDL sponsors legal and development projects to advance open source software as well as initiatives for Linux systems in telecommunications, in the data center and on enterprise desktops. Visit OSDL on the Web at http://www.osdl.org/.



OSDL is a trademark of Open Source Development Labs, Inc. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Third party marks and brands are the property of their respective holders.

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