ICPC NERC Huawei Challenge — Cloud Scheduling Challenge

Hello everyone!

We are thrilled to invite you to the great event — ICPC NERC Challenge powered by Huawei 12 — 20 December 2020.

This contest is based on some real problems from Huawei Cloud team. The task is simplified, but still very challenging. You need to find a schedule for a variety of realistic problem instances, where the goal will be minimizing two different cost functions. There is a non-trivial tradeoff, decision you have to make, on how to choose what is best for a particular case. You will be provided with examples that can help you to tackle the problem. A good solution may also require diving deeper into the nature of the problem, and creating some dataset of your own. We believe there are multiple approaches one can try here, and some crossover of the algorithms will also increase your chances to win. Good luck, we hope this will be fun!

The ICPC NERC Cloud Scheduling Challenge powered by Huawei will take place online during the week December 12-20. This round is unrated for all participants. Everybody is welcome to participate. It is an individual competition. Participants will be divided into two groups: Northern Eurasia Contestants 2020 (all subregions) and all other Participants. If you are a NERC 2020 contestant and you want to take part in ICPC NERC Challenge, link your ICPC account to the Codeforces account here: https://codeforces.com/settings/general

The top-scoring participants will also receive great prizes. Huawei will provide prizes to the 12 winners in both groups accordingly:

• 1-4th place — HUAWEI P40 PRO
• 5-8th place — HUAWEI MATEPAD PRO LTE
• 9-12th place — HUAWEI WATCH GT 2E

Good luck to all participants!

ICPC NERC Challenge Rules

Participant Requirements

This is a contest for individuals. Participants must compete by themselves and may only use publicly-available information from the Internet. Participants may not access any information requiring any form of authentication (cloud storage, etc.).

Computing Resources

Participants must provide their own computing resources such as CPU, memory, disk, etc. Such resources can be physical, cloud-based, etc.

Conducting the Challenge

For this ICPC NERC Challenge, there will be a single problem statement will be posted in English. 

During the contest, all communications from contest officials to participants will be in English. A participant may submit a claim of ambiguity or error in a problem statement by submitting a clarification request. If the Judges agree that an ambiguity or error exists, a clarification will be issued to all participants.

Only solution source code is submitted for judging Challenge. Such a Submitted Solution must fully comply with the solution specification. The system may limit the submission and judging rate of Submitted Solutions.

Scoring of the Challenge

The Challenge Judges are solely responsible for determining the correctness and score of Submitted Solutions. In consultation with the Challenge Judges, the Director of Challenge Judging (DoCJ) is responsible for determining the winners of the ICPC Challenge. The DoCJ is empowered to adjust for or adjudicate unforeseen events and conditions. Their decisions are final. Each accepted Submitted Solution is assigned a score (see Problem Specification for scoring metric). A Total Score is computed by the best, accepted Submitted Solution for the Challenge. Participants are ranked according to their total score. Ties in total score are broken by the earliest time of the last score-increasing Submitted Solution. A score-increasing submission is any submission that results in a higher total score for the participant.

Participant Conduct

Participants are not to converse with anyone except personnel designated by the Challenge Director. A participant may be disqualified for any activity that jeopardizes the ICPC NERC Challenge such as violating the rules, disruptive activities, attempts to deny timely service, etc. The DoCJ makes the final determination on disqualification