Termination Competition 2025 technical details

Execution Environment

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

Tools must be submitted as Apptainer or Docker images. The competition will run using Apptainer (which can run both Apptainer and 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.

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 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 Docker Hub, so that it can directly be passed to "docker pull".