Hardware spec?

General
#1

Participating in the spring 2025 challenge, which has an aspect of low level optimization, so I wonder what kind of hardware (limits) there are.

Especially:

  1. RAM? The rules I find say limit is 768MB, but I manage to allocate more than that. What is the actual limit, or are we as programmers responsible to keep it under the 768MB (and risk disqualification if we exceed that)?

  2. Number of CPU cores? I see in the compile flags that pthreads are enabled for C/C++ submissions, suggesting a multi-core arcitecture. Also I found a mention that each entry is run on a hyper-threaded core, giving virtually an extra core to help us. Since I don’t notice any speedup, rather a slowdown, by using additional processes or threads - I suspect there is no additional core. Anyone care to clarify?

  3. Code optimization? I gather that optimization is disabled (for C/C++) to improve compile times. Are GCC pragmas and attributes that influence code generation fair game? Or do I risk disqualification if I turn them on? (If not, why are the optimization flags not on? Everyone has to enable them anyway…)
    Are SIMD intrinsics or inline assembler valid? There was a mention about it is forbidden to use a language inside another…?

Thank you for any clarification you can provide! Even if it is just one of the considerations above.

/T

ps: and how come nobody else has wondered about these things years ago … anything I am missing!?

#2
  1. there is a hard limit and I’ve hit it before; unless this is different from the previous contests, the conditions in the final rerun should be the same as in the validators
  2. there is only 1 core that you can use
  3. yes, you should use pragmas etc., and SIMD/assembler should be fine as well; that rule was added(probably) because I reminded the staff on discord that it’s possible to use system calls to e.g. run a C++ exe from python
#3

Thank you.