As I already mentioned on the Kitware blog, the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code this year. You can see the VTK entry in Melange, and browse through our project ideas. I have taken part in the Google Summer of Code program since 2007 (first as a student, and later as a mentor) as part of the KDE project. I still maintain close ties to KDE, and work on several related projects such as Avogadro, CMake and VTK. VTK has Qt integration, and ParaView builds on both VTK and Qt for the visualization of large scientific data sets.
If you are a student, and would like to work on an exciting open source project, processing and visualizing some of the largest scientific data sets in the world, take a look at the Visualization Toolkit. There are a wide range of ideas, and if you have an idea you think would fit then please feel free to discuss it with me. I will let you know if it would be a good fit, and whether we have available mentors for the proposed project. We have mentors available who are experts in visualization, large data, parallel algorithms and related technologies. The core of VTK is written in portable C++, with new changes being tested daily. Our API is automatically wrapped in Python, TCL and Java.
I am very excited about VTK’s first year in the Google Summer of Code, this represents a unique way for students to get involved in a large, well tested open source project. We have started using Gerrit for code review, and you can view build and test results on many platforms for VTK both continuously and nightly. We have a well established software process which will serve you well in any project where software quality is important, with nearly 1400 unit and regression tests. This is a large, collaborative project with more than 100 contributors last year (as measured by Ohloh).