Hi Suresh I will be glad to be a part of open source community through GSOC 2013. I respect the key ideas behind GSOC and will work keeping in mind the points made by you. I like the idea that not only we will be a having challenges and learning in engaging with Airavata but also our contributions will be incorporated into release and will be used in production.
I am playing around with Airavata so to have some understanding of its flow. I would like to know the elaborated details of Airavata -798 which you are talking about. On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 5:42 PM, Suresh Marru <[email protected]> wrote: > GSoC Students, > > It is good to see the enthusiasm and your correspondence on the jira > tasks. Based on last years GSoC experience and in general to align with > Airavata goals, we want to rethink the GSoC projects a bit. Just to give > you guys some context, last year gsoc projects did not yield as much as > they should have, not entirely because of the lack of interest or ability > of students but the nature of how Airavata is. > > Key goal of GSoC is to teach students how to participate in open source. > Its not just about coding, its about engaging in a community. Apache > Airavata is a general purpose distributed systems framework. But it is > heavily used in scientific projects building workflow systems and science > gateways. And a good number of projects are using Airavata in production > supporting a significant numbers of scientists. These characteristics > presents some challenges and also provide some good opportunities. > > Ideal GSoC projects should be self contained and not be on a critical path > of the project so the student can work and learn freely. But the downside > of this approach is the features may never make it back to the mainstream > code base. So we would like this years project to directly work of the > trunk, not in an isolated branch. That way we can ensure the contributions > are immediately incorporated into release and get used in production. But > this puts a high barrier on the quality of code to be written, more > importantly well tested code. See Airavata TDD approach [1]. > > Secondly, Airavata Architecture is still evolving, so its very tough for > students to survive through this turbulence. If you are expecting a well > defined water fall model of software engineering, Airavata is not a place. > The development is truly agile and what you start working may not be what > you end up working on. Students should be able to adapt and more > importantly enjoy these challenges. If you get frustrated which changing > designs, ideas and so on, then this is certainly not a good project for you. > > Lastly, there will be a good amount of learning curve and not all design > intrincies are documented. Lot of them, you have to dig through the code > and ask the right questions to understand. This might very well expose you > to dive into core of Airavata Services - Workflow Interpreter, GFac, > Registry, Messaging System. Also the Airavata API came a long way but is > still primitive. There is a lot of scope for improvement internals API's > like GFac API are way mature and it takes effort to expose all these > capabilities through API > > In a nut shell, if you are intending to do a GSoC project just for the > sake of money and resume addition, Airavata will not be a good fit. We need > students who can survive through these challenges and reap the benefits - > seeing your code in real-world production, publish papers, take on > challenges, work with other smart people and so on. Lot of these will take > up time, so if you are very interested but will not have time to contribute > in next 6 months, please think again. > > Feel free to ask any questions, but I am trying to set the expectations > right, so you will not get disappointed. > > Cheers, > Suresh > > [1] - > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/AIRAVATA/Tests+in+Airavata > > On Mar 23, 2013, at 8:18 AM, Suresh Marru <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi All, > > > > Please propose GSOC 2013 ideas and label them with gsoc2013 in the JIRA. > Note you have to be a PMC member to mentor a project. But the students and > other community members are more than welcome to propose idea on the > mailing list. > > > > I will start with few now. > > > > Cheers, > > Suresh > > > > -- Regards Sanchit Aggarwal MS CSE IIIT Hyderabad
