GSoC - Designing a faster index format

Hello everyone,

I am not sure if this is the right way to apply GSoC or if this project is still available?  I just subscribed a few hours ago, don't blame me :)

I am interested with "Designing a faster index format" project.

I am new to git, only started using git yesterday.

The reasons for applying this is:
1. I like C
2. I like doing optimization
3. I want to contribute to a open source project - to git, a plus

From the idea, I realize the problem is that index is verified and rewritten on any operations which is unnecessary sometimes. And the objective is to reduce the number of operations to below logN.  As I am new to git, I  I couldn't give a detailed plan to this for now. I should have gonna through more documents or codes but there's only one week for application. So I have to jump up from nowhere :P

I got questions like: how each operations affect index? how cache tree data and index is stored? Maybe you can point me how I should catch up quickly. I went through the article "git-for-computer-scientists", that quite makes sense.

About me:

My name is Elton Tian, I am from China. I have been living in Australia for quite a few years. I am currently a Master student from Australia National University. I have lots of experience in C during my undergraduate: socket, RPC, pthread, etc.. After graduate I worked with linux based web development for 2.5 years. We used tcl, apache and cvs. Last year, as a student project, I had chance to benchmark and modify hadoop distributed file system and mapreduce on a small cluster. I have to configure and maintain the cluster by myself.

My IRC nick is "eltonsky".

Regards, Elton