The Center for Research In Open Source Software (CROSS) at the University of California in Santa Cruz (UCSC) aims to bridge the gap between student research and open source software projects. CROSS turns OSS prototypes into successful open source software projects. The Center was created in 2015 inspired by the story of UCSC alumni (and CROSS benefactor) Sage Weil, who turned his research prototype into a multi-million dollar company. We draw from this expertise of our affiliated experts and industry members to choose projects that will have maximum real world impact. Our projects--which typically center around the work of senior graduate students and post-docs-- are mentored and guided by a team of experts chosen specifically to best ensure success.

CROSS uses a combination of teaching, networking, research and incubation of open source projects. Our industry members include Micron, Huawei, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. CROSS currently supports seven open source software projects-- three research projects and two incubator projects.

These projects currently include:

• ZLog: Distributed Shared-log for Software-defined Storage (Research)
• Smart Storage Devices in Genomics (Research)
• Mantle: A Programmable Metadata Load Balancer for the Ceph File System (Research)
• Strong Consistency in Dynamic Wireless Networks to Enable Safe and Efficient Navigation of Autonomous Vehicles (Research)
• An Efficient C Library for Unum 2.0 (Research)
• Skyhoook: Elastic Databases for the Cloud (Incubator)
• The NIMBLE environment for statistical computing (Incubator)