MetaOJ: A massive distributed online judge system

Online Judge (OJ) systems are a basic and important component of computer education. Here, we present MetaOJ, an OJ system that can be used for holding massive programming tests online. MetaOJ is designed to create a distributed, fault-tolerant, and easy-to-scale OJ system from an existing ordinary OJ system by adding several interfaces into it and creating multiple instances of it. Our case on modifying the TUOJ system shows that the modification adds no more than 3% lines of code and the performance loss on a single OJ instance is no more than 12%. We also introduce mechanisms to integrate the system with cloud infrastructure to automate the deployment process. MetaOJ provides a solution for those OJ systems that are designed for a specific programming contest and are now facing performance bottlenecks.