View source for CodeMarshal Judge: Deploying Cloud to Enhance ACM ICPC Reach

'''CodeMarshal Judge: Deploying Cloud to Enhance ACM ICPC Reach'''


'''Mohammad Mahmudur Rahman'''<br>
Mukto Software Ltd<br>
Dhaka, Bangladesh

'''Mahmud Ridwan'''<br>
Mukto Software Ltd<br>
Dhaka, Bangladesh	

'''Shahriar Manzoor'''<br>
Comp Science & Engg. Dept<br>
Southeast University<br>
Dhaka, Bangladesh	

'''Miguel A. Revilla'''<br>
Dpto. Matematica Aplicada <br>
Facultad de Ciencias <br>
Universidad de Valladolid




Abstract

ACM ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest), as the most prestigious and widely accepted programming contest in the academia, has already impacted the life of a great many Computer Science students as well as students from other disciplines around the globe. This year we have a staggering 33,430 contestants from 2,385 universities participating in the regional contests. But in our long affiliation with ACM ICPC as contestant, judge, archivist and mentor, we have sadly experienced that each year we fail to accommodate many other aspiring students due to insufficient logistics. Many of these students never return the following year and thus get deprived of the potential impact of ACM ICPC in their lives. For example, there have been on average accommodation for 100 teams in ACM ICPC Dhaka Regional for 400 odd registered teams in the last few years. Several attempts of holding a preliminary contest never came to fruition. The most stumbling barriers were unavailability of a judging engine capable of smoothly managing very high submission load in a real time judging environment as well as technical difficulties and cost required in arranging a multi-site contest. In order to solve these problems by harnessing the immense power of cloud computing, we experimentally introduced the highly scalable cloud based judging engine CodeMarshal ( algo.codemarshal.com ) for the ACM ICPC 2013 Dhaka Site Preliminary event ( www.northsouth.edu/acm-icpc-2013/pre_standings.htm ) with the inspiration and mentorship of the iconic Valladolid Online Judge ( uva.onlinejudge.org ). A total of 494 teams from 54 schools got the opportunity to become a part of ACM ICPC and advance to the next round based on their own merit. The engine handled around 1500 simultaneous users and over 5000 submissions in 5 hours with the maximum verdict delay of 2.7 seconds. With this fast and greatly scalable Judging engine in hand, we focus on how we can utilize it's power to enhance ACM ICPC participation beyond the 100,000 contestants mark in near future.