The Oregon State University Open Source Lab's talented development staff and student employees develop tools that help projects work more efficiently and offer open source solutions to meet the needs of organizations on the community, state and global levels.
Our development solutions have served many open source projects as well as educational and government organizations looking to implement or extend open source software to meet their needs. Here are a few recent projects the OSL has worked on:
Ganeti Web Manager (GWM) is a Web application developed at the OSL that allows administrators and clients access to administer and use Google’s open source cloud infrastructure. With a caching system designed to scale to many thousands of virtual machines without decreasing performance, GWM makes private cluster management for administrators truly simple.
The Oregon Virtual School District is a program led by the Oregon Department of Education that, in cooperation with a consortium of virtual learning providers throughout the state, seeks to increase access and availability of online learning and teaching resources free of charge to the people of Oregon. Oregon State University is providing hosting and development resources for the project.
The Protein Geometry Database (PGD) was developed by the OSU Open Source Lab for use by researchers in OSU's biochemistry department. PGD provides an online search tool used to mine protein conformational space with a user-friendly but surprisingly flexible graphical interface.
OSL development staff have worked on multiple aspects of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Sugar projects. Two of the larger projects the OSL has worked on in relation to the OLPC are the media player and printing support. Collaboration and interaction are a huge focus for the OLPC project, which seeks to provide inexpensive laptops to children in developing countries around the world. Because the laptops are able to record video with a built-in webcam, there was need for a media player. In partnership with Real, the Open Source Lab offered to take on this project. The software to fill this void is the media player activity for Sugar, the user environment for the OLPC project. The activity is a full-fledged media player, tailored specifically to fit within the human interface guidelines that the Sugar team has provided. The media player was created using Python bindings for the Helix DNA Client. It has been designed to provide the best media experience possible while maintaining a level of simplicity that children all around the world will be able to handle.
Pydra is a distributed and parallel computing framework for Python. Pydra aims to provide an easy-to-use framework for writing and running distributed programs for developers, and an easy-to-manage cluster for the administrators.
The majority of our development projects are funded through donations we receive from both the OSL Alliance and the Friends of the OSL programs. In certain cases, we have an agreement in place and charge for our development services. This is especially true for educational institutions and state and local government agencies looking for help developing open source software.
OSU Open Source Lab
224 Milne Computer Center
1800 SW Campus Way
Corvallis, OR 97331
info@osuosl.org
Phone: 541-737-9900
