FLOWSHOP CONTEST

Rules of the game
Problem description
Source Code & Benchmarks
Registration
IV GRID PlugtestsTM - Joint European Union/China GRID Days
Beijing, CHINA, 28th October - 2nd November 2007


CO-ORGANIZERS:

     
ERCIM - European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
ETSI - The European Telecommunications Standards Institute
INRIA - The Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control



Further to the success of the 3rd GRID Plugtests in 2006 (200 participants from many different countries), ERCIM, INRIA and ETSI decided to organize this year an enhanced event, GRIDs@Work in Asia composed of:

This event will take place on a Grid infrastructure with many different machines and protocols.
You may provide machines to this effect.



We would like to invite you to make a place in your schedule for a competitive challenge focused on Permutation Flowshop Scheduling - you have the chance of being one of the participants in the programming contest organized by ERCIM, ETSI and INRIA in Beijing, China on the 28th October 2nd November 2007. The event will take place at CNIC, Beijing (further details may be found by following this link). The goal of this contest is focused on solving difficult permutation flowshop benchmarks.

Get involved in a great challenge by deploying during the event a progam able to solve a difficult given permutation flowshop scheduling benchmark, in a given time slot, on a live worldwide GRID of interconnected processors. More than 4000 processors were made available for the last year contest. The participation to the challenge as well as to all the preliminary and remote qualification tests are free of charge. The facetoface competition will take place from the 30th October till the 1st November, 2007.

Join a scheduling programming contest organized by ERCIM, ETSI and INRIA in Beijing, China on 28th October - 2nd November 2007 - Real-time contest: REGISTRATION LINK. Be prepared to beat other registered participants in real time. There are prices to win. Read the rules of the game.


THE GRID COMPUTING OPPORTUNITY
Grid computing offers a model for solving massive computational problems using a large number of computers arranged as clusters, embedded in a distributed telecommunications infrastructure.

GOALS OF THE EVENT
- Bring together Grid Researchers, Industrials and Users;
- Learn through the Grid users experience about the future features needed for the Grid platform;
- Learn how to best program Grid aware applications;
- Get important feedback on the deployment and interoperability of Grid applications on various Grid.

WHO SHOULD COME TO THE EVENT
- Researchers and engineers willing to hear about programming techniques for the Grids
- Researchers and engineers willing to win the Flowshop Scheduling contest during the Plugtests event
- Software- and Hardware vendors, service providers and end-users of various industrial fields


To participate in the game and declare your interest (free), please send an e-mail to: El-ghazali.Talbi@lifl.fr, Alexandru-Adrian.Tantar@inria.fr, Patrick.Guillemin@etsi.org, plugtest@etsi.org with:
  • The name of the group and each candidate willing to participate in the scheduling challenge
  • The name of the responsible person (interlocutor and team representative)
  • Your e-mail contact
If you just want to play remotely without attending and discuss the challenge before taking part, you can subscribe to the related discussion list: PLUGTESTS-GRID@LIST.ETSI.ORG, in which case: Subscription to the list is free and is opened to people interested in this challenge and will be used to follow up the challenges.

The benchmark(s) to be solved during the contest will be provided in the same format as the Taillard's benchmarks! The first instance of the 20 jobs x 5 machines benchmarks is given below, as an example:

number of jobs, number of machines, initial seed, upper bound and lower bound:
20587365422112781232
 
processing times:
     54 83 15 71 77 36 53 38 27 87 76 91 14 29 12 77 32 87 68 94
     79  3  11 99 56 70 99 60   5 56   3 61 73 75 47 14 21 86   5 77
     16 89 49 15 89 45 60 23 57 64   7   1 63 41 63 47 26 75 77 40
     66 58 31 68 78 91 13 59 49 85 85   9 39 41 56 40 54 77 51 31
     58 56 20 85 53 35 53 41 69 13 86 72   8 49 47 87 58 18 68 28


C++ source code example for the PERMUTATION FLOWSHOP scheduling problem, along with a few benchmarks can be downloaded in ZIP format. The format used for benchmark files that can be found inside the archive, is not similar with the format used for the benchmarks that can be found on Taillard's site. The following should stand as a short description of the format used for the benchmark files found inside the archive (not the one which will be used during the contest!!):
  • the first number is the number of jobs to schedule (N).
  • the second number is the number of machines (M).
  • the next numbers are the same for each job:
    • availability date of the job
    • due date of the job
    • scheduling time needed on each machine (M numbers)
The benchmark(s) to be solved during the contest will be provided in the same format as the Taillard's benchmarks!

Grid Users will try to beat in realtime others participants programs generating the best possible instance for the famous scheduling problem. A set of very well known benchmark files can be found on Taillard's site.

There will be only one game round with a time slot of one hour for each participant - you may found a few more details in the Rules of the game. Virtually, there is no limitation on the number of test runs you may perform unless for the time limit, constraints imposed by the number of participants, resource allocation, etc.

A results summary, for the proposed benchmarks, may be accessed on Taillard's page by following the next link - results summary. Also, some of the instances haven't been solved till this time, representing an extremely interesting point on the contest's list.




SPONSORS
 


EUROPEAN PARTNERS