SIGMOD 2010 Programming Contest

Initial Call for Entries -- Second Annual SIGMOD Programming Contest Indianapolis, IN, June, 2009 http://dbweb.enst.fr/events/sigmod10contest/ A programming contest is organized in parallel with the ACM SIGMOD 2010 conference, following the success of the first annual SIGMOD programming contest organized last year. Student teams from degree-granting institutions are invited to compete to develop a distributed query engine over relational data. Submissions will be judged on the overall performance of the system on a variety of workloads. A shortlist of finalists will be invited to present their implementation at the SIGMOD conference in June 2010 in Indianapolis, USA. The winning team, to be selected during the conference, will be awarded a prize of 5,000 USD and will be invited to a one-week research visit in Paris. The winning system, released in open source, will form a building block of a complete distributed database system which will be built over the years, throughout the programming contests. Task overview The system to implement is a simple distributed query executor built on top of last year's main-memory index (an implementation of which will be provided). Centralized query plans will be supplied and will have to be translated into distributed query plans, to be executed on each peer of a cluster of machines. An initial computation of statistics can be run over each peer in order to optimize the distributed query plan. The system must be able to efficiently execute the query over each peer, with the help of the in-memory index, gather the results from each peer, and perform any other necessary operation on a monitoring peer. The system will be tested on a collection of synthetic and real-world datasets, with appropriate query loads. The interface is planned so that the distributed query engine can be tested either on a single machine (local processes acting as peers), on an ad-hoc cluster of peers, or on an evaluation cluster made available to test the performance of the system in the conditions of the final evaluation. To help contestants test their implementation, any team whose system passes a collection of unit tests can be provided with an Amazon Web Services account of a 100 USD value (up to 30 accounts are available, on a first-come, first-served basis; up to two accounts per team can be provided, depending on demand). This is made possible thanks to the support of Amazon. All details will be made available on December 13, 2009. Important Dates Sunday, December 13, 2009 Interfacing code and example workload made available. Friday, February 6, 2010 Evaluation infrastructure made available. Sunday, April 4, 2010 Submissions due. Friday, April 16, 2010 Notification of a shortlist of finalists. Sunday, May 30, 2010 Final submission by finalists due. 6–11 June, 2010 SIGMOD conference in Indianapolis, USA. Presentation of the works of finalists, and announcement of the winner. All deadlines are 5:00pm UTC (10:00am PDT, 1:00pm EDT). Organization Organizers * Pierre Senellart (Télécom ParisTech) * Clément Genzmer (Yahoo! London and Télécom ParisTech), winner of last year's contest Advisory board * Serge Abiteboul (INRIA Saclay) * Magdalena Balazinska (University of Washington) * Samuel Madden (MIT) * Michael Stonebraker (MIT) Sponsorship The contest is supported by Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, INRIA Saclay, and Exalead. Advertising the contest A (letter-sized) poster is made available for advertising the contest at http://dbweb.enst.fr/events/sigmod10contest/poster.pdf Feel free to display it in your institution.