We will talk about the whole software design & design mindset in this section.
I recommend you to read the following list in order:
- Domain Driven Design (DDD)
- System Architecture
- Clean Architecture
- Database Schema Design
- Judger Design
- DevOps Design
- Deployment Design
Modern Online Judge system queues the codes, compiles, runs and tests them in a FIFO manner.
The FIFO judges are not scalable under massive amount of concurrent submissions.
To mitigate the problem, some online judges are improved to support multi-node FIFO judges,
where each node holds a FIFO queue to increase the throughput.
However, multi-node FIFO judges is not efficient when resource scheduling or sharing matters.
For example, time-intensive judges such as GPU-related codes.
As each requests a couple of GPU devices and executes for a longer time compared to regular codes.
In such case, we need a middleware that helps schedule the resources and run the judges in a distributed way.
To be honest, this project has another humble objective: to see how Domain Driven Design (DDD), Clean Architecture (a methodology written in Uncle Bob's book) and Microservices apply in the complex real world's requirements.
Thus this project will be an open source and any discussion or contributions are welcome.
Let's conclude our project's objectives:
- Implement a scalable and maintainable distributed online judge system that judges massive amount of codes in parallel, as to increase throughput.
- Encapsulate the judges within Docker containers and sandboxes to ensure security.
- Integrate Kubernetes over multiple nodes to enable resource scheduling (e.g. GPUs, CPUs and Memory) among judges.
- Use microservices design pattern to enhance maintainability and extensibility.
- Start an open source project on Github so other developers can contribute to the code-base.
Next: Domain Driven Design