The National Science Foundation has awarded a $16,000 grant to Elon associate professor Megan Squire to hire student researchers for an ongoing project initially funded by the NSF in 2007.
The NSF project that Squire co-founded and co-leads, “Data and Analysis Archive for Research on Free and Open Source Software and Its Development,” expands the FLOSSmole repository for data about free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) development.
She received a $100,000 grant two years ago to begin her work in collaboration with researchers at Syracuse University. That grant is part of the cyberinfrastructure category of grants and is funded through the NSF’s Directorate for Computing and Information Science and Engineering.
Squire and her students will work to collect data on open source software, which allow users to use, change, and improve the programs, and to redistribute the software in modified or unmodified form. Open source software is often developed in a public, collaborative manner.
Jamie Schatz, a computer information systems major, and Steven Norris, a computer science major, are the two students Squire hired to assist with the research. Norris will be writing data collectors, automated “spiders” that collect data about open source software from the internet and store it in a giant database that is housed at Elon and replicated to the San Diego Supercomputer Center Teragrid. The Teragrid is an NSF-funded data center.
Schatz will be using a graphics engine called The Processing Environment to automatically generate graphs and plots of the datafrom the database. These graphs and plots will take hundreds of gigabytes of data and present this data to researchers in a more visual, understandable format.