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OpenAFS Workshop

About Google Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code is a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors.

About OpenAFS

OpenAFS has a rich heritage that spans back to the Andrew File System (AFS), originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Andrew Project. The vision of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University was to create a scalable distributed computing environment with a single namespace, providing seamless user mobility between workstations.

The AFS distributed file system was implemented by CMU researchers between 1986 and 1989, resulting in the AFS3 protocol, which gained adoption among academic institutions. In 1989, Transarc Corporation commercialized the AFS implementation. The Transarc Corporation was acquired by IBM in the 1990s and AFS development and support was continued by IBM Pittsburgh Labs. During this period, the commercial AFS implementation was deployed at research, government, and commercial organizations.

IBM released OpenAFS in 2000 under the IBM Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license. Since then, support for new platforms have been added, performance has been improved, and maintenance and security updates are delivered by the OpenAFS project.

OpenAFS has a large, mature code base of over 800,000 lines of mostly C language code with support for a wide variety of operating systems. The project includes servers, kernel modules, networking, storage, and command line tools. Developing code for OpenAFS gives you the opportunity to make a significant difference to a product that is in large scale production use, and to learn key development skills. We have a supportive community of developers who are keen to see new developers enter our project, and happy to help out as you get up to speed.

New developers are encouraged to join the OpenAFS developers mailing list, join the #openafs IRC channel, and read the OpenAFS Contributor Guide.

Project Proposal Guidelines

Students are responsible for writing a proposal and submitting it to Google before the application deadline.

See the OpenAFS Project Ideas page for a starting point for project ideas. We welcome proposals which are variations of these project ideas and new project ideas as well. Please reach out to us on the development mailing list to discuss project proposals.

You must disclose whether you used LLM AI to help you write your project proposal (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc), even if you did not use any such AI tools. That is, include a statement like one of these in your proposal:

"This proposal was written with the assistance of [ChatGPT/Gemini/etc] to [check spelling / check accuracy / format text]".

or:

"This proposal was written without the use of any AI tools."

If your proposal does not contain either of these statements, your proposal will not be considered.

Using AI for project proposals is allowed, but please try to write as much as you can in your own words. If your English is not very good, that's okay! A human-written proposal with grammar or spelling mistakes is preferred over an obviously AI-generated proposal.

Please do not submit a proposal completely generated by AI.

A strong proposal will include:

General Information

Name
Email
IRC Nickname
Your libera.chat nickname.
Biography
Tell us about yourself. What skills do you bring to this project? What do you think you will need to learn to complete this project?
Availability
How many hours per week will you spend working on this? How many on other things? What other obligations do you have this summer? Be as specific as possible.

Project Information

Project Title
In forty characters or less, what you propose to do.
Project Description
A few paragraphs describing your project. It should not be a direct copy from the ideas page. Proposals should reveal that you have done some research into the problem and its solutions.
Deliverables
A list quantifiable results and related code milestones. We suggest at least two milestones before the mid-term evaluations and two after. Where appropriate, this schedule should include multiple committable or releasable points so people can benefit from and/or test your work as early as possible.
Test Plan
What parts of your code need testing and how do you plan to test them?
Project Schedule
How long will the project take? Standard projects are 12 weeks.

Our Google Summer of Code History

OpenAFS is proud to have mentored numerous successful projects in the Google Summer of Code program. You can find detailed reports and summaries from our previous years below.