Google Kicks Off Summer of Code 2012

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Students, start your coding engines. Google’s annual Summer of Code program, which helps college students write open source software during their summer vacations, starts today.

Past participants have helped improve everything from popular web frameworks to browser add-ons and even operating systems. Summer of Code is also not a half bad way to get yourself on Google’s radar — the company looks at the results of the program to help it “identify potential recruits.”

Summer of Code has served as a launchpad for quite a few new open source software projects as well as helping to jumpstart work on existing favorites. This year’s roster includes some 1,208 students who will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 180 different open source organizations.

With 208 proposed projects, there’s a pretty good chance that some Summer of Code improvements will be rolled into your favorite open source projects later this year. Some promising projects include several efforts to help improve OpenStreetMap, the so-called “Wikipedia of maps,” as well as Code for America’s various projects, some new features for Git and an ambitious plan to bring Pylint into the modern world of Python 3.

There are also quite a few GPU-related projects:

• Graphical Explorer of CUDA programs (The Gauss Research Group has created a new tool called GKLEE that does a formal verification of CUDA programs. I wish to integrate GKLEE’s debugging potential into Eclipse’s Parallel Tools Platform.)
• Geant 4 on GPUs (Radiation transport simulations)
• Extending Polly with Automatic GPGPU Code Generation
• GPU for fast hashes
• GPU-Based Neural Simulator
• Particle Filter on GPU

For more info on this year’s Summer of Code, head over to Google’s Summer of Code website, which has details on all the various projects and participants. You can also get updates from the Summer of Code page at Google+.

[via webmonkey]

Tags: Google, programming

Category: Computer Science, News