Google announced last week the University’s STELLAR research group at the Center for Computation and Technology will participate in the 2014 Summer of Code program.
According to the program’s website, Google’s Summer of Code is a worldwide program that offers students stipends to produce computer code for open source projects.
Open source software is source code for public use, said Hartmut Kaiser, University CCT consultant and senior scientist.
Kaiser said being a part of Google’s Summer of Code program is a selective process.
“Organizations create a range of proposals, and Google picks which ones they want to pursue,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser said they applied last year, but were not selected. He attributes this year’s success to the large visibility of their current work in the open source community.
Adrian Serio, STELLAR project coordinator, said high performance clusters need software to coordinate their use of applications.
The high performance computing community at the University centered around the scientific applications of supercomputers like SuperMIC, Melete and SuperMIKE-II, has developed applications for more than two decades, which hasn’t been the most efficient way, Serio said.
Kaiser said they want to produce software allowing people to utilize supercomputers today and in the future.
Another quandary they hope to solve is the massive amount of energy used by such machines.
Kaiser said one of the machines can use 25 megawatts of power, which is approximately equivalent to that used by 25,000 homes.
Kaiser said they are still looking for students, preferably with C++ knowledge, to work with them during the summer.
Selected students will receive a stipend from Google, whether or not it ends up using their code.
“The traditional way of writing programs for those machines doesn’t work as well anymore.”
LSU selected for Summer of Code
By Renee Barrow
March 16, 2014