= Google Summer of Code 2013 project ideas =

== Enhance the BOINC Android GUI ==

The current BOINC Android GUI is functional but not visually appealing,
and it lacks some usability features.
The project is to design and implement improvements to the GUI.
Possibilities includes:

 * Add graphics to the GUI; for example, allow projects to supply
   slide-show images illustrating their science.
 * Implement mechanism that allow users to smoothly navigate
   from the GUI to web-based features on project sites,
   as is done on the desktop BOINC GUI.
 * Implement the "notices" mechanism that allows project to push
   news items to volunteers.

== Automated testing of BOINC ==

We're in the process of deploying a Jenkins-based automated test system for BOINC.
Help us add unit tests to the BOINC code,
and to design end-to-end tests that exercise the entire system
under a range of use cases and error conditions.

== Job size matching ==

Some BOINC projects now have applications with versions for GPUs, CPUs, and mobile devices.
The speed of these devices varies by roughly 3 orders of magnitude;
a job that takes 10 minutes to complete on a GPU might take a week to complete on a mobile device.
This disparity is undesirable - we'd like all jobs to take roughly the same amount of time.
To do this, we need a way to generate an appropriate distribution of jobs sizes,
based on a dynamic resource pool,
and we need a scheduling mechanisms that distributes jobs appropriately.
Design and implement these.

== Accelerating batch completion ==

Volunteer computing resources are unreliable - computers fail,
people uninstall BOINC, and so on.
Roughly 5% of jobs fail or time out.
This means that in a batch of 10,000 jobs, 500 or so will fail.
We retry these (after a delay of a few days) and 25 or so will fail, and so on.
Thus is can take quite a long time to finish the entire batch.

This problem can be solved by using more reliable computers to handle retries
and jobs at the end of a batch.
Doing so, however, is tricky.
Design and implement a mechanism for doing this.