\section{Platform}\label{sec:plat}

After deciding to move the competition to Innsbruck, the Computational Logic Group in
Innsbruck designed and implemented a platform for managing and running the competition. The main capabilities required were:

\begin{itemize}
\item Author-driven submission of termination tools
\item Automated competition scheduling and running
\item Web interface for viewing results
\end{itemize}

The first version of the competition platform consists of two components: the web-
interface itself and a scheduler with which the web interface interacts. The competition run in November 2008 showed that the platform per se is robust and fulfils the requirements, but also has a lot of room for improvement.

\subsection{Software Environment}
The platform was programmed using JavaEE, the web-framework used is JBoss Seam. The complete interface runs on a dedicated JBoss server on the competition server. The scheduling component is also written in Java and uses Quartz as the job management framework. The database back-end is a PostgreSQL server.

\subsection{Hardware Platform}
The competition platform currently runs on a Sunfire x4600 with 8 Dual-Core AMD Opteron CPUs and 64GB of RAM. This system is a 64-bit system and offers tools the possibility of implementing and using parallel algorithms as compared to the previous versions of the competition which were limited to single CPUs.

\subsection{Current Development}



Currently, two new components for the execution platform 
are in development: a component allowing users 
to submit custom-built experiments on the reference competition hardware 
and a component which will allow statistical analysis 
of the results from previous competitions.

