SIGMOD 2010 - SIGMOD 2010 Programming Contest Distributed Query Engine

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.

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?Task Overview
?Important Dates
?Task Details
?Regulations
?Organization
News
2010-02-14: Evaluation cluster made available
The evaluation and submission cluster is now available.
2010-02-04: Small modification in the dates
The date where the evaluation cluster is made available, as well as the submission dates are delayed one week.
2009-12-13: Task details made available
The full task details are made available. The contest is now open!
2009-12-13: Mailing list
A mailing list has been created to publish technical information about the competition. Contestants are encouraged to subscribe to it. This complements the Atom feed that will provide more general news.
2009-11-19: Poster
A letter-sized poster is made available for advertising the contest.
2009-11-17: Prize announced
We can now announce the amount of the prize awarded to the winner of the contest: 5,000 USD. This comes in addition to an invited research visit in Paris.
2009-10-09: Initial description of the contest
The initial description of the contest is available on the SIGMOD 2010 programming contest website.
Contestants and other interested parties are invited to subscribe to the Atom feed of the SIGMOD 2010 programming contest, that will serve general news about the competition.

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.