Challenge Overview
Project Overview
"Zero Robotics" is a robotics programming tournament for high-school students where the robots are SPHERES satellites that operate on the International Space Station (ISS). As part of the ramp up to a future competition, the existing Zero Robotics website will be revamped to change its present look and feel and the backend and programming interface will be revamped to be more robust and functional.
Competition Task Overview
This contest should provide detailed module architecture deliverables for following tasks.
This is direct-to-assembly module architecture.
One of our top priorities is being able to restart the farm consistently, which would allow for a much better automated deployment system.
Right now, we have to do the following:
- Mark the files for deployment by increasing the version number in version.properties
- Restart one processor node
- Wait for it to come back up
- Restart the controller, which deploys to all the processors
If we don't restart one and only one processor first, the controller goes haywire and starts repeatedly rebooting, which usually requires a hard kill, clear cache, delete deploy folder, and restart. Steps to reproduce:
- SSH into controller
- Deploy some files if you want--the bug will occur regardless of whether there are new files
- telcon to connect to telnet console
- At telnet console: shutdown
- Reboot loop begins. The farm may or may not appear to be all connected from the console, but it will not handle simulations.
There are a lot of steps in deployment and a lot of possibility for variation. It's very hard to deploy anything to the farm because there's just too much risk of human error.
There is a major rewrite afoot for the spring that will remove Liferay from the stack, so for this competition, please focus on the farm and farm clients rather than the other Liferay stability problems.
Here are 4 tasks:
1. Fix controller restart bug
2. Fix problem with clients disconnecting from controller
3. An auto-deployment system for farm content (mostly game code)
4. Auto-scaling of number of processor nodes based on load
SVN
https://coder.topcoder.com/tcs/clients/inspire/zr-simulation/
Competitors can request SVN access to study existing code. Please send your request to subversion@topcoder.com along with the contest id/name and your handle.
Final Submission Guidelines
- TCUML
- ADS
- Assembly Contest Specification