IBM Z Student Contest

Submissions will be made in the form of code written by the contestant.

The submissions must decode and interpret data that will be described in clues but not provided in its entirety to contestants. They will get information about what type of information to expect, how the data could be formatted, the expected output style, how it will be executed, how it will be judged, and a few more clues that will allow them to best write their code.

A series of connected challenges (“Drops”) will enable access to progressively more data – interpretation of data in each drop may be dependent on the output from previous Drops. As each Drop is completed, contestants must define an executable script in their Z login profile “home directory” to perform the required data processing and output; final submission will be a single executable script which may choose to run some or all of the Drop-specific scripts as a “pipeline”.

Contestants will submit their “pipeline” for subsequent automated execution against the judging datasets; data formats and field/column names will be consistent with the test datasets provided in the Drops. Contestants will not have access to the judging datasets.

Only Contestants’ pipelines which produce correct output data (both content and format) will be included in the automated ranking processes based on factors such as:

• End-to-end execution time,
• Minimal resources used,
• Minimal dependency on 3rd party code/libraries