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. It was used to conduct the ACM ICPC World Finals until 2008. As of 2009, the ACM ICPC World Finals switched to using Kattis, the KTH automated teaching tool.
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Computer programming contests and PC²
Computer programming contest have 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 problems to solve in a limited amount of time (for example 8-13 problems in 5 hours). The judges then give pass/fail judgements to the submitted solutions. 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 test in 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 log in, test solutions, submit solutions and 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 was in use by the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest from 1994-2008. 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 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. Using a central datacenter in the Fall of 2005 revealed no problems. In 2014, PC2 crashed 3:45h into the contest, preventing teams from obtaining receipts for their submissions. Judges were unable to retrieve submissions - the contest ended without announcing a winner. It took one week to try to recover those submissions. A similar failure occurred in 2016. System administrators had decided to deploy a web add-on to PC2 which then failed under load. The contest start time was delayed by 90 minutes. Teams were unable to submit problems and the contest director scrambled to find a work-around that let teams save problems with a time stamp to be considered later. In 2013, system operators failed to enter the correct team names, leaving teams without information about the standings in the contest (the scoreboard). System operators were unable to correct the team names during the contest. Because of these incidents, organizers of the region are now considering moving to an alternative system, such as Kattis, which is the official system used by ACM for the ICPC World Finals.
With the introduction of version 9 (socket-based version) delays, most firewall issues with version 8 have been addressed.