GSOC Introduction / Eliminate O(N^2) scaling from rw-conflict tracking in serializable transactions

Hello psql hackers,

my name is George Papadrosou, this is my first semester as graduate student at Georgia Tech and would like to submit a proposal to Google Summer of Code, for the project "Eliminate O(N^2) scaling from rw-conflict tracking in serializable transactions”.

A short bio, I have a CS undergraduate degree from Athens University of Economics and Business. I had taken two databases courses where the first one was about sql, relational algebra, xpath and generally using an RDBMS while the second one was more about the internals, like storage, indexing, query planning and transactions.

I have 3+ years professional experience in web technologies with a focus on the backend and I recently started my master with specialization in computing systems. One of my first courses that I am finishing this May is High Performance Computing(parallel algorithms), which seems to be closely related to this GSOC project.

I have not done any research on databases yet but I regard this project as an opportunity to make an initial contact with postgres' internals until I dive more into database algorithms. My future goal is to work on databases full
time.

I am going to prepare a draft proposal for this project and share it with you soon. The project’s description is pretty clear, do you think it should be more strictly defined in the proposal?

Until then, I would like to familiarize myself a bit with the codebase and fix some bug/todo. I didn’t find many [E] marked tasks in the todo list so the task I was thinking is "\s without arguments (display history) fails with libedit, doesn't use pager either - psql \s not working on OSX”. However, it works on my OSX El Capitan laptop with Postgres 9.4.4. Would you suggest some other starter task?

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards,
George