Information Storage and Management Student Projects

March, 10

The first seminar on co-op student projects took place at EMC St. Petersburg Development Center. The idea of a co-op project is that EMC engineers identify research directions or exact sets of tasks that can be proceeded by University students under professors’ and engineers’ mentoring. This cooperation format requires the topics and tasks to be the common purposes, so the results can be the public domain.

At the seminar we reviewed 5 projects’ progress.

Cirrostratus project mentored by Stanislav Bogatyrev (EMC) and Anton Kosyakin (Software Engineering department, St. Petersburg State University - SPbU) has a team of 6 SPbU students and 3 students from Computer Science department in St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics - IFMO. Under this project framework students investigate open source implementation of existing solutions (like DST) of distributed storages optimized for cloud infrastructures. Project mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/cirrostratus-dev

MyFit project, initiated by Alexey Rytenkov (EMC) who joined the company as an intern, introduces to students industrial software development process. Two students from St. Petersburg State Electro-Technical University develop a web-based application that extends technology used in open source tool Fitnesse http://fitnesse.org/ - the fully integrated standalone wiki, and acceptance testing framework. The group where Alexey works uses Fitnesse, uses Fitnesse to support agile development process for their product. The project has also a ‘double-agent’ consultant – Kirill Krinkin, EMC engineer who teaches some courses at Electro-Technical University. For the last 3 months WYSIWYG test editor was developed and functionality of fixture templates and fixture lists was added.

Next 3 projects are coached by Petr Alekseev from IFMO Univeristy. All the topics were indentified with a great help from Artem Zarafyants (EMC).

XAM-project team of 3 students developed by themselves XOnce - a domain specific language (DSL) that makes easier (by order of magnitude) to write interaction scenarios for open standard interface (XAM) for Content Addressable Storages. Using this DSL they implemented a library for storage systems replication and corresponding GUI/console utilities to work with this library. The source code is available at http://xreplicator.sourceforge.net/. As a DSL framework MPS by JetBrains was used.

X-Hive (xDB - native XML databases). Another team of 3 students initially planned to develop a system for medicine e-cards but to start fast decided to simplify the goal as personal information manager. As a result we’ve seen the implementation of the server and the client sides for events, contacts and multimedia notes synchronization for PC and mobile devices via internet. Here is a blog post by Maxim Kolchin from X-Hive team about how they’ve started the project (in Russian).

Sources are available:

• http://github.com/KMax/Quicker-Server
• http://github.com/KMax/Quicker-Client-PC

WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management is also applied for storages management and monitoring). 2-member team works on the CIM events viewer as a plug-in for Eclipse. It took significant time and affords to create specific development environment including Open Pegasus, Eclipse, Ultimate CIM and Java. After the seminar Artem Zarafyants recommended to shift activities to develop MOF (Managed Object Format) code editor as an Eclipce plug-in. Source code: http://wbem.googlecode.com/