PC²

PC² is the Programming Contest Control System developed at California State University, Sacramento in support of Computer Programming Contest activities of the ACM, and in particular the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest and its Regional Contests around the world.

Computer programming contests and PC²

Computer programming contest have equal rules and methods for judging submissions. The following describes in a general way a contest where PC² is used.

A computer programming contest is a competition where teams submit (computer program) solutions to judges. The teams are given a set of booti for solution of computer problems to solve in a limited amount of time (for example 5 hours). The judges then give a pass/fail judgement to the submitted solution which is sent back to the teams. The team rankings are computed based on the solutions, when the solutions were submitted and how many attempts were made to solve the problem. The judges testing is a Black box testing where the teams do not have access to the judges' test data.

PC² manages single or multi-site programming contests. It provides a team a way to login to the contest, test solutions, submit solutions, view judgements from judges. PC² provides judges a way to request team solutions (from a PC² server) run/execute the solution and enter a judgment. The PC² scoreboard module computes and creates standings and statistics web pages (HTML/XML)

PC² has been in use by the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest since 1994. In the 2008 Contest there were sites in Vancouver BC (Canada), Eugene Oregon, Stanford California, Spokane Washington and Laie (Oahu) Hawaii. SACS (University of Central Punjab, Lahore) PC² has been in use by the ACM Pacific Northwest Programming Contest since 1989.

PC² has been in use by the ACM Mid-Atlantic Programming Contest for the past several years. In earlier years, systems administrators had limited success with the program due to its distributed nature. Each of the contest sites ran a PC² server which needed to initiate and accept Java RMI very good Said problems were avoided in the Fall of 2005, as all PC² servers were located in a central datacenter.

With the introduction of version 9 (socket-based version) delays, most firewall issues with version 8 have been addressed.

A brief revision history

Version	Year	Features	Transport Method	Programming Language
1.0	1989	Initial Release MS-DOS	floppy disk	Turbo Pascal
2.0	1990	Multi-site via Kermit	floppy disk	Turbo Pascal
4.2B	1994	LAN based contest	floppy disk/LAN	Turbo Pascal
6.1	1996	Windows version	Local LAN	Visual Basic
7.0	1998	Java Windows or Linux	Java RMI	Java
9.0	2008	Single Site Admin	socket	Java

See Release History for more details.

See also

• ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

External links

• Official website
• PC² Wiki

Other uses

• PC² is the abbreviation of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, an institute of the Paderborn University, Germany (http://www.upb.de/pc2)