If you have landed at this repository directly, you first should read up on bit of a background here.
PA1 AutoGrader itself runs as a distributed server-client application, with multiple server instances deployed (one-time setup) by the course staff and the client side distributed to the students/Teaching Assistants (TAs), which they can use to test the submission and get a score.
The AutoGrader takes as input, on the client side, the student source code which is first uploaded to each of the grading machines, built and then tested for a given test case.
The Grader directory holds both the client and server components.
The Template directory contains the source for the code template distributed to students (see here).
- Five(5) Linux hosts/machines
- Networking setup such that all the five hosts are reachable from each other
- User accounts and work/disk space for each student to be able to do development/testing to complete the assignment
- stones.cse.buffalo.edu
- euston.cse.buffalo.edu
- embankment.cse.buffalo.edu
- underground.cse.buffalo.edu
- highgate.cse.buffalo.edu
Students should already have user accounts on the above hosts as part of the UB CSE infrastructure.
However, the home folders of students reside on a disk space that is shared among all CSE student servers. Given that PA1 involves implementation of file transfers, this makes home folders unsuitable for students to do development/testing of PA1. As a fix, CSE-IT creates a directory for each student on a non-shared disk mounted at /local on each of the five hosts.
Typically, the course instructor provides the list of students enrolled in the course each semester to CSE-IT and folders are created for each student. For example, for Fall 2017, for a student with UB-IT name [ubitname] the work/test directory could be
/local/Fall_2017/[ubitname]
- Instructor/Course staff NEED to inform the students of work directory's path to be used for all their assignment related work.
- Care should be taken in setting correct permissions for the student work folders so that they are only accessible by the student that the folder is assigned to.
Server source, requirements, and setup instructions are hosted under the Grader/remote directory. The server side is written completely in python and makes use of expect scripts to interact (I/O) with the submission being tested. When run, it exposes an HTTP server which the client uses for all communication.
Client (distributed to students) source is hosted under the Grader/local directory. Note that typically the client side of the grader is distributed as a single executable binary, instead of the raw python source files to avoid imposing any additional setup requirements on student machine environments. Setup instructions include steps to convert the python source to a Linux executable. It should be fairly straightforward to adapt the conversion process for any other OS the course staff wishes to support. In addition, we also include steps to run the grader directly from source to allow for easy debugging.