ACM SIGMOD 2012 Student Programming Contest: A Multidimensional Indexing System

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

NSF funding supports travel grants for U.S.-based student teams to participate in the fourth annual programming contest held at SIGMOD 2012 in Scottsdale Arizona, May 20-24, 2012 (http:// http://www.sigmod.org/2012/). The contest is open to graduate and undergraduate teams from degree-granting institutions. This year's task is to implement a multidimensional high-throughput in-memory indexing system. As with previous years, the goals of the contest are to: (a) stimulate student interest in the database management systems 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 be acknowledged for their problem-solving and programming skills. The contest is conducted during the first two quarters of 2012, with a bake-off among the finalists at the conference. A $5,000 prize, donated by SAP, will be awarded to the winning team. 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 and a special effort will be made to encourage participation from under-represented groups. The programming contest will emphasize that the community values real implementations in addition to fundamental research, and will potentially lead to open source software that will be used by researchers outside of the community. For more information see the Program Contest website (http://wwwdb.inf.tu-dresden.de/sigmod2012contest/).