Two NCSA groups to participate in Google’s Summer of Code

This summer, two teams of National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) researchers will be participating in Google’s Summer of Code program, which introduces students to open-source software. From May to August, applicants will get hands-on experience programming for open-source organizations’ projects, spanning from 3D printing to genomics and even using open-source software to investigate particle physics.

“Google Summer of Code provides an opportunity for students from around the world to participate in open-source software development,” said Nathan Goldbaum, Research Scientist at NCSA and Google Summer of Code mentor. “Participating communities not only gain new features, documentation, and bug fixes provided by the students, they also have the opportunity to transition new contributors to habitual long-time contributors and maintainers, one of the hardest problems for the academic open-source software industry.”

Two groups featuring NCSA researchers, the NumFOCUS group and the PEcAn Project, will function as mentors in Google’s Summer of Code by expanding open-source education in the realms of scientific visualization and climate change, respectively, thus giving students an opportunity to gain vital skills while advancing their open-source mission.

The yt Project, which falls under the NumFOCUS organizational umbrella, features NCSA’s Matthew Turk, Nathan Goldbaum, Meagan Lang and Kacper Kowalik as mentors. Through this, they will provide hands-on direction and assistance on scientific visualization with yt, responsible for many of the breathtaking visualizations NCSA produces.

The PEcAn group, which includes NCSA’s David LeBauer (Co-PI), Kenton McHenry (Co-PI), and Rob Kooper, seeks to use open-source software to synthesize existing data on climate change. In turn, this easily-accessible and digestible data can be used to inform policy or management decisions pertaining to climate change.

Visit Google Summer of Code to learn how you can participate in the program in the future, or how you (and your organization) can become mentors.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

About Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a three-month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university.

Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together 13,000+ student participants and 12,000 mentors from over 125 countries worldwide. Google Summer of Code has produced 33,000,000+ lines of code for 608 open source organizations.

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