Sea, sun, student projects: Mat Fur Summer School

This summer, a summer school was held on Mateh, organized by the Department of System Programming. The purpose of this event is to give students the opportunity to participate in the actual development and teach how to behave in a team. This is done to reduce the gap between university education and the IT industry.

In the spring, I already talked about the initiative of the Department of System Programming at St. Petersburg State University to improve the educational process in IT, namely about student projects. As a rule, the summer school is a natural continuation of successful student projects.

In this article I will give a brief report and tell you a little about changes in the organization (participation of Intel, EMC and Digital Design).
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This time at the presentation of the results, which took place a week ago, we first tried to organize a video broadcast (archive here , please do not scold for the mediocre quality of the picture - the first pancake came out lumpy).

In addition, this summer was plentiful for the organizing companies. If earlier all projects were exhibited by Lanit-Terkom, then this time it was also joined by EMC and Digital Design. And Intel in general held its own summer school with coffee breaks and buns.

EMC and Digital Design Projects

EMC has presented a project to develop a kernel profiler . The object of the study was the OS Microsoft Windows Server 2008. They talked about several measurement mechanisms (capturing SSDT, intercepting system calls, ...), as well as interfaces of interaction with the kernel, which allow keeping time records. Record the presentation here .

The project from the company Digital Design has studied various tools and algorithms for data deduplication systems ( write ).

Projects were also presented from other companies, such as CentrInform ( RFID hacking project) and Kaspersky Lab ( non-functional testing ).
Finally, the HackerDom team presented its Hanipota project.

Projects of Lanit-Terkom

Unlike the previous ones, the projects of this company did not begin in the summer, but were a continuation of last year’s student projects.
Of the projects themselves, I remember two games:

• BoardGameMaster
  The guys created a framework for building multiplayer online games (based on the web services technology) and demonstrated its work on the example of the game Dominion
• Teeworlds
  This team focused on the real-time problem in building network games. They showed their success with the example of TeeWorlds (unfortunately only in video recording with network delay emulation)

Well, the veteran projects mentioned in the previous article. Over the summer, many new things have been done:

• Android Geocaching
  Mobile client for working with the portal www.geocaching.su under the Android platform. This application has already been submitted in the fall. It has greatly improved, both from the point of view of the interface and from the technical side (communication with the server, parsing of xml, and so on). As a result, the application has more than 3000 downloads . Record broadcast here .
• Embox
  Small configurable OS for embedded systems. Again, it was in the previous article. The project continues to evolve, this time we focused our efforts on simplifying the lives of kernel developers and users. For example, we added a driver for the ne2000 PCI network card (this helped in debugging the network on QEMU), partially implemented compatibility with POSIX (which allowed transferring one of the LISP interpreters to our OS), improved tools (plug-in for Eclipse). Record here .

I’m writing about Embox in the first person, as I’m the developer of this project myself.

Intel Summer School

Naturally, first of all, Intel conducted classes on its products (Meego, Atom), but there were also quite interesting lectures on general topics (for example, Usability). The level of lecturers was quite high, so the lectures were not boring and quite informative.

The Intel school bonus was a social package that includes accommodation in hostels, lunches, coffee breaks and other treats.

The disadvantages I would mention are that these were only lectures (albeit interesting ones), after all, the summer school implies a practical approach, teamwork, and the creation of a software product. As a result, Intel did not have a clear separation of projects, and they did not participate in the presentation of the results.

Student projects 2011/12

In conclusion, I will say that today, on September 26, student projects were presented for the new academic year. Among them were projects of different directions: from web servers and mobile applications to a project to create a multi-core computer based on FPGA.

Here is a list of projects:

• Development of reengineering tools - a framework for developing and researching parsers, generators and compilers for the .NET platform
• "Running City" - a mobile application for information support of the competition of the same name
• Mobile Geocaching - a continuation of the Android Geocaching project, now they propose to make a version for Windows Phone 7
• SkyShoot is a multiplayer arcade shooter with a top view. The guys want, using XNA, to write an application simultaneously for Xbox 360 and PC
• WindViewer - web service to display the forecast of the winds for yachtsmen
• Developing Eclipse extensions to support visual modeling.
• Creating a service for laying the optimal route , taking into account the traffic situation
• Development of the architecture of a multi-core computer - the guys propose to transfer the ideas of CUDA technology to the FPGA (FPGA), that is, to create a framework for building a multi-core computer with specified characteristics. And in the development it is planned to use the HaSCoL hardware description language, developed at the Department of System Programming. The basis will be the implementation of the Microblaze soft-processor based on this language.
• Embox - continue to write code .