The idea is that you upload your code through our website, which then runs your code and reports on its performance. Only one upload runs at a time (so multiple users don't interfere with each other), and besides the web server and database for tracking the website, there is no other software running on the machine. Both of these should incur an extremely light load.
Your code will need to be compiled as a 64 bit Linux .so file, as is done in our Makefiles. Your .so must not depend on any shared libraries being installed on the machine except those listed here.
When you upload your code, you will be given a choice to run the unit tests, run the speed test, or run the leaderboard test. The unit tests and speed tests simply run the code we have provided to you and give you an output file. The leaderboard test runs the speed test many times with different random seeds and reports the average of those runtimes; if your upload also passes the unit tests, it will appear on the "Leaderboard" page. Please do not try the leaderboard test until after you are sure your code passes both other tests, as it takes significantly longer to run and will hog resources on the test machine.
Please note that top entries on the leaderboard are not necessarily the contestants we will invite to be finalists at SIGMOD; you will be required to submit your source code to us, which we will compile and run against our own internal tests (which will be similar to speed test but may use different parameters) for the purposes of determining finalists.
The machine is a 2 x 4 (e.g., two quad core) Intel Xeon machine with 16GB of RAM. For details about the CPU on this machine, see:
http://db.csail.mit.edu/sigmod09contest/cpuid.html
The machine is running Redhat Fedora Core 10, with kernel version 2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.x86_64.
If you have questions, comments, or concerns, please email them to:
sigmodcontest09@nms.csail.mit.edu