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:// 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/).
The fourth Annual SIGMOD 2012 programming contest was held leading up to the SIGMOD conference in Scottsdale Arizona. NSF provided a generous travel grant that was used to help attendees travel to the conference. The contest was open to graduate and undergraduate teams from degree-granting institutions. The contest prize was donated by industry (Microsoft, this year) to provide a prize of $5,000.00 to the winner. The contest was organized by members from 2011’s winning team with the support of their advisor (Wolfgang Lehner). NSF funding was used for travel grants for participants and equipment for the contest. The contest task was to build a multidimensional high-throughput in-memory database index structure that supports common database operations such as point and range queries as well as data manipulation. Application scenarios for such multidimensional indexes are, for example, efficiently querying multimedia, CAD or geospatial data. The goal of the contest was to provide the highest possible throughput on a set of benchmarks that we provided. The intellectual merits of the contest were that high-performance versions of indexes like these form the underpinnings of modern database systems and are of critical importance to their operation. The broader impact of the contest is that it engages groups of students from around the world in a common task. Many of these students have never participated in research before, and this is a way for them to participate in the community in a way that does not require them to have a full-blown research paper. Many of these students go on to do PhD's in computer science in the US and Europe. Details of the benchmark, results, and participating teams are available on the contest website at: http://wwwdb.inf.tu-dresden.de/sigmod2012contest/.
