Sun Oct 20 22:21:06 CEST 2013

How running time has to be considered. For those running serial programs 
the 120 seconds of time limit are meant to be on usertime.
For programs that use parallel computing the 120 seconds time limit are 
meant to be on realtime while the limit on usertime is 120*4.

Mor especifically this is the way the programs are called:

ulimit -v 8000000 -t (120+10)*4; timeout -s 6 (120+10) time -f "user %U" gcp ... -t 120


- gcp -t 120 should impose a limit of 120 on realtime internally to the 
program. Unfortunately, the C++ frameworks distributed check usertime instead, 
hence if you are using parallel computing, avoid checking time internally.
- 'time' should measure usertime (this is preferred because it gives indication 
about who is using parallel computing, in that their times will be greater than 120 sec.
- 'timeout' should impose a time limit on realtime. A discount of 10 sec is added 
to be kind with the programs that do not themselves halt internally as recommended.
- 'ulimit' should impose a time limit on usertime. It has been decided to use *4 
because there are 4 processors on the test machine. The machine could have been 
exploited even more since there are 4 cores for each of the 4 processors. 
But for this time let's keep it to a factor of 4.

Note that the memory restriction to 8GB is meant to be shared in case of parallel computing.



Tue Oct 15 18:21:06 CEST 2013

For those using Java, note that you need the library libbin2asc.so to be
compiled on a 64-bit machine to work on the testing machine.

You can choose one of the following three solutions.

1. Download the package swig.x86_64.tgz

2. Recompile the library on a 64-bit linux machine. Go in the swig/
  directory

  make clean

  make

  (there was a make file missing in swig.tgz, which has been included on
  Tuesday, October 15 at 18.)

3. Download the library and replace it in swig:
  http://www.imada.sdu.dk/~marco/DM811/Resources/libbin2asc.so



Thu Oct 17 13:39:41 CEST 2013

The limit on the running time has to be considered as real time or
wallclock time and not usertime. Hence it is possible to use all 4
processors of the machine for 120 seconds of real time, that is, in
principle up to 120*4 seconds usertime.

There is a memory usage limit to your programs of 8GB.