In order to promote research in black-box optimization, we organize a competition around Nevergrad and IOHprofiler.
The competition has two tracks, one classical, performance-oriented track, and one track focusing on general benchmarking best practices. More details are available on our webpage at http://www-ia.lip6.fr/~doerr/OpenOptimizationCompetition2021.html. Submissions to the GECCO competitions track are welcome. Winners will be announced at CEC, at GECCO, and on the web pages of Nevergrad and IOHprofiler.

• Track 1: Performance-Oriented Track: Contributors submit an optimization algorithm as a pull request in Nevergrad as detailed below. Several subtracks (“benchmark suites”) are available, covering a broad range of black-box optimization scenarios, from discrete over mixed-integer to continuous optimization, from academic functions to real-world problems, from one-shot setting over sequential optimization to parallel settings.
• Track 2: General Benchmarking Practices: contributions are made by pull request to Nevergrad or to IOHprofiler and by posting a short documentation (can be very short) somewhere (homepage, arXiv, pointer to a paper, etc). This track invites contributions to all aspects of benchmarking black-box optimization algorithms, e.g., suggesting new benchmark problems, performance measures or statistics, visualization of benchmark data, extending or improving the functionalities of the benchmarking environment, etc.