Broadway Grader

A worker node in a distributed autograding system which runs a pipeline of docker containers and communicates with the master node (Broadway API). More information about the distributed autograder and the grader's role and responsibilities are on the API's Wiki page.

The grader uses the Chainlink library to sequencially run docker containers and aggregate results.

Installation

The Braodway grader instances require Python 3.5+.

Environment

The following environment variables need to be set before continuing:

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"

Python Packages

We recommend installing packages inside a virtualenv. To create one, run:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-venv
python3 -m venv venv

Then activate the virtualenv and install the packages from requirements.txt:

source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Additional Software

Docker is needed to containerize incoming job requests. We recommend using the convinience script on docker.com and completing the suggested post-installation steps.

Configuration

Ensure API_HOST and API_PORT in the config file (config.py) is pointing to the Broadway API instance you have set up.

Running

Start the grader using:

nohup sudo venv/bin/python run.py <cluster token> &

Note that under sudo the python interpreter path changes to /usr/bin/python even when inside a virtual environment.