An Experience on the Organization of the First Spanish Parallel Programming Contest

The first Spanish Parallel Programming Contest was organized in September 2011 within the Jornadas de Paralelismo, in La Laguna, Spain. The aim of the contest is to disseminate paral- lelism among the participants and Computer Science students who can use the material generated in the contest for educational purposes. The contest is similar to other sequential and parallel pro- gramming contests in which teams participate by solving a set of problems in a given time. But the Spanish contest has characteristics which distinguish it from other contests: an automatic tool (Mooshak) is used to validate the solutions and the tool has been modified to send the solutions to a cluster of nodes and to obtain the classification based on the speed-ups achieved; candidates can participate both in situ and online; a classification with the records for each problem is maintained on the web page of the contest, with explanations and codes of the record solutions so that the page can be used for educational purposes. This paper summarizes the experience and perspectives of the contest.