SIGMOD 2011 Programming Contest

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This proposed project is to support the third annual programming contest to be held at SIGMOD 2011 conference in Greece. The funding is to sponsor travel for the contest participants to the conference and staffing for running the contest at MIT. The contest is open to graduate and undergraduate teams from degree-granting institutions. This year's contest task is to build a system that stores (key, value) pairs sorted in key order, durably on a Flash disk. As with previous years, the goals of the contest are to: (a) stimulate student interest in the DBMS field, (b) present a research challenge, (c) foster the creation of sharable open source code modules, (d) foster Computer Science education by creating a forum where students can excel, and (e) present a forum where excellent students can get noticed without writing papers. This contest will stimulate the database community to develop robust open source implementations of challenging research software. Such implementations have intellectual merit in that they provide a base upon which other researchers can build tools and students can learn how others have architected large data management systems. The contest will attract young, eager, students with enthusiasm for building real systems to the database community. It will emphasize that the community values real implementations in addition to academic papers, and will potentially lead to open source software that will be used by researchers outside of the community. To promote participation from under-represented groups, participants from such groups will be especially encouraged.