Climbing Mont Blanc - A Training Site for Energy Efficient Programming on Heterogeneous Multicore Processors

TL;DR

Climbing Mont Blanc is an online judge platform designed for training energy-efficient programming on heterogeneous multicore processors, providing real-time energy consumption feedback to improve programming practices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online judge system that evaluates energy efficiency of programs on heterogeneous multicore hardware, integrating energy metrics into programming training.

Findings

System successfully evaluates energy consumption and efficiency.

Used in a university course for teaching parallel computing.

First platform to report energy-efficiency in online programming judging.

Abstract

Climbing Mont Blanc (CMB) is an open online judge used for training in energy efficient programming of state-of-the-art heterogeneous multicores. It uses an Odroid-XU3 board from Hardkernel with an Exynos Octa processor and integrated power sensors. This processor is three-way heterogeneous containing 14 different cores of three different types. The board currently accepts C and C++ programs, with support for OpenCL v1.1, OpenMP 4.0 and Pthreads. Programs submitted using the graphical user interface are evaluated with respect to time, energy used, and energy-efficiency (EDP). A small and varied set of problems are available, and the system is currently in use in a medium sized course on parallel computing at NTNU. Other online programming judges exist, but we are not aware of any similar system that also reports energy-efficiency.