Make has many wonderful features to greatly facilitate very complex data analysis scenarios and parallelize them with minimal coding.

As more researchers are getting familiar with advanced Make usage in Maneage, they are designing interesting Makefiles for their research that exploit very interesting/advanced features of Make that they have found.

So, to help in spreading the useful techniques, I propose to hold something like an annual Makefile contest, for Makefiles related data analysis. We can even apply for grants/sponsorship and give prizes to the winners.

Each application/participant would need to accompany the Makefile with a README file that describes the special techniques used and how they benefit from those techniques.

We can then setup a set of criteria for evaluating the submissions. For example, define points on the actual problem to be solved, optimal parallelization strategy, "elegant" design, good comments/documentation, etc.

We can then select the best submissions and promote them in a special page on maneage.org.

This was brought up after a discussion with Zahra Sharbaf, while discussing a very elegantly designed and highly optimized (in terms of parallelization) Makefile that we have been working on as part of her project (which will soon be published). It employs very interesting Make features, but they may be too problem-specific to discuss generally.

A contest like this, would allow sharing of all this valuable experience with the "Maneager" community :-).