Select universities dominating Computer Science competitions is nothing new. MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkley have been known as CS hotbeds for some time. Clarkson University, in upstate New York, began its bid to join the ranks of the elite when the results of the IBM Linux Scholar Challenge were annoucened. Students entered from all over the world, submitting improvements to some part of the linux kernel. Four students from Clarkson were among the 25 students who won IBM thinkpads for there effort. Only one other university [University of Karlsruhe] had multiple winners, with two winning entries.

Read on for some details of their winning entries and a story from the professor who lead the class.

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Jeanna Matthews, assistant professor of Computer Science, taught the class advanced operating systems class that produced all of the winners. She gave an interview to IBM's Developer Works news site. In it she describes her methods for learning a new OS, and shows how adding simple system calls to linux can introduce a person the source.

Each of her winning students also gave interviews detailing their winning projects (including some source code):

Phil Allen and Matthew Finlayson discuss their thread pool library.

Stephen Evanchik describes his new group resource accounting patch.

Bryan Clark details his own resource accounting system.