DPhil in Computer Science - Student projects

This is a call to arms! To those of you who enjoy challenges that involve writing blazingly fast code to support data management applications.
Are you interested in working in a small team to compete in the annual SIGMOD programming contest? This year (2011), the task is to implement a high-throughput main-memory index which is made durable using a flash-based SSD. More information is available here. This can be your 4th-year or MSc project.