tdrhq / opc

The CMI Online Programming Contest Judge

About

The CMI Judge is a configurable automated Judge for Online Programming Contests. The CMI-Judge was originally designed for the popular CMI Online Programming Contest, and has been used, in various versions, since 2004. CMI also uses it every year for its onsite Fiesta Programming Contest. The Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS) uses CMI-Judge for conducting several rounds of the Indian Computing Olympiad.

The CMI Judge is currently maintained by Arnold Noronha arnold@cmi.ac.in, a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania.

System Requirements

CMIJ has been used on various flavors of Debian and Ubuntu. That said, it should not be very hard to get it to run on other flavors of Linux/*nix. It will not work on Windows.

The basic requirements:

• An Apache Web Server, with mod-php5 for running PHP scripts.
• PHP5, with the Command Line Interfact. (php5-cli on Debian)
• A database backend: SQLite3, Postgres, or MySQL.

Source code: CMI-Judge code: "git clone git://github.com/tdrhq/opc.git" Zend Framework: http://framework.zend.com/download/overview

In order to build and set up the system you're going to need: * GNU build-essential, g++

Several other packages: The PHP database modules, depending on which database backend you're using. (php5-sqlite, php5-pgsql, or php5-mysql on Debian) Frontend formatting tools: php5-tidy, php-geshi (see below) * Compilers and interpreters for running the submissions: g++, gcc, gcj (for Java), python, perl.

Recommended: * GeSHi (>=1.0.8). GeSHi is used for syntax highlighting. Latest Debian distributions have this version and can be installed with "apt-get install php-geshi". You can also download GeSHi into the backend/ directory.

In addition, for a high-security environment, you might want to use debootstrap to create a chroot-ed environment for running the contest.

Installation

Copy the "Zend" directory from Zend Framework into the "backend" directory of the CMI Judge. I imagine you know have the following directory structure:

/backend /backend/Zend /webfiles

• Backend setup for SQLite:

SQLite will not scale, and is not recommended for production use. Nevertheless, it's the easiest to set up, and very convenient if you just want to play around with the Judge.

~$ cd backend/
~/backend$ ./autogen.sh
~/backend$ make
~/backend$ sudo make secure (optional)

And that's it.

• Backend setup for PostgreSQL or MySQL.

Follow the instructions for SQLite. You need to create a database and a database user in either Postgres or MySQL for this step.

Now edit backend/local_config.inc with the following lines:

<?php
config::$DB_Name="judgedbname" ; //that you created earlier
config::$DB_User="dbusername" ; 
config::$DB_Password="dbpassword" ;
config::$DB_Hostname="localhost"; //or the host name if it's different
config::$DB_Adapter="Pdo_Pgsql"; //or Pdo_Mysqli

At this point, your setup should work. You should be able to access the judge by pointing to the webfiles directory using HTTP.

Once you add a problem, you can submit solutions. In order to process submissions as they come, you need to run backend/programs/queuemanager.php in the background.

See Advanced Frontend Setup for more configuration details.

Adding problems

See docs/ContestAdministration

Adding Contests

See docs/ContestAdministration

Alternatives

When this Judge was first written, there were few, if any, configurable open source judges available. Today, almost every University has its own [buggy] judge. There are few credible open source alternatives available:

• PC^2 http://www.ecs.csus.edu/pc2/

PC^2 is one of the most popular contest Judges, but as of today does not support an online mode of operation. It is used for almost all onsite contests, including the ACM ICPC World Finals.

• Mooshak http://mooshak.dcc.fc.up.pt/~zp/mooshak/

Probably one of the more popular web based Judges. I have had experience with it as a participant at an ACM ICPC Regionals, in 2006. At that time it was buggy. I think it provides far more configurability that the CMI Judge.

• hackzor http://code.google.com/p/hackzor/

Hackzor is a simple Python based judge from Anna University, Chennai. I mention it because I used it as a basis for some parts of the CMI Judge. I don't believe it is actively mainted.

Apart from that, several Online Programming Archives can directly host contests for you. You might want to contact one of these:

• The IARCS Online Judge http://opc.iarcs.org.in

Maintained by me :-). This archive is based on the CMI Online Judge, and hosted reliably on Amazon EC2, courtesy of IARCS. I would help you organize your contest, and we can work out some amount of compensation for my efforts. :-)

• SPOJ http://www.spoj.pl

SPOJ is well known for hosting many private contests.

• CodeChef http://www.codechef.com

CodeChef is based on the SPOJ (I think), and I do think they hold private contests.

• UVa Judge http://uva.onlinejudge.org/

One of the oldest and most well known online judges.