View source for Termination Competition 2025 technical details

== Execution Environment ==

Starting from 2025, TermComp runs on the RWTH HPC cluster.

Tools must be submitted as Docker images. The competition will run using Apptainer (which can run Docker images). During the competition, the following two commands will be executed in your container:

* solver --name
* solver --timeout=$timeout --category=$category $benchmark

So an executable named "solver" must be available in your container.
The former command must print the name of your solver to stdout.
The latter must analyze the provided $benchmark w.r.t.\ the rules of the given $category, taking the given $timeout into account.

A list with the exact category names will be published before the competition.
They will essentially be identical to the names of the corresponding TPDB directories.

Resource limits:
* 4 cores
* 60s wallclock time
* 20.345 MiB RAM

== Testing Locally ==

* Install [https://apptainer.org/docs/admin/main/installation.html Apptainer].
* Build and tag your docker image locally. In my case, its full name is loat/loat-termcomp:445e86.
* Convert your docker image to an Apptainer image via
<code>apptainer build $apptainer_image.sif docker-daemon://$docker_image</code>
<br/>
So in my case, the full command is
<br/>
<code>apptainer build loat.sif docker-daemon:loat/loat-termcomp:445e86</code>
* First test
<code>
apptainer exec $apptainer_image.sif solver --name
</code>
</br>
In my case, I get:
</br>
<code>
apptainer exec loat.sif solver --name

LoAT
</code>
* Then test
<code>
apptainer exec solver --timeout=60 --category=$category $benchmark
</code>
</br>
In my case, I get:
</br>
<code>
apptainer exec loat.sif solver --timeout=60 --category=Integer_Transition_Systems TPDB/Integer_Transition_Systems/From_AProVE_2014/Velroyen08-alternDiv.jar-obl-8.smt2 

NO
</code>

== Lessons Learned from Testing ==

=== General ===

* The image must be for an '''amd64-architecture'''.

=== Docker - Apptainer incompatibilities ===

The following things must be taken into account if you submit a Docker image.

* The solver-command must behave as intended '''for all users''', not just for a specific one.
* The solver-command must behave as intended '''independently from the current working directory'''.

== Registration ==

To register, you need to create a pull request for [https://github.com/TermCOMP/registration this repository].
More specifically, to register for a certain $category, checkout the branch for the corresponding competition (e.g., the branch 2025 for termCOMP '25) and add a line to $category.txt.
The content of the line must be the identifier of your Docker image on [https://hub.docker.com/ Docker Hub], so that it can directly be passed to "docker pull".