Section: New Software and Platforms

Orchestra

Keyword: Experimental mechanics

Functional Description: Ochestra is a set of tools meant to help in performing experimental campaigns in computer science. It provides you with simple tools to:

+ Organize a manual experimental workflow, leveraging git and lfs through a simple interface. + Collaborate with other peoples on a single experimental campaign. + Execute pieces of code on remote hosts such as clusters or clouds, in one line. + Automate the execution of batches of experiments and the presentation of the results through a clean web ui.

A lot of advanced tools exists on the net to handle similar situations. Most of them target very complicated workflows, e.g. DAGs of tasks. Those tools are very powerful but lack the simplicity needed by newcomers. Here, we propose a limited but very simple tool to handle one of the most common situation of experimental campaigns: the repeated execution of an experiment on variations of parameters.

In particular, we include three tools: + expegit: a tool to organize your experimental campaign results in a git repository using git-lfs (large file storage). + runaway: a tool to execute code on distant hosts parameterized with easy to use file templates. + orchestra: a tool to automate the use of the two previous tools on large campaigns.

• Contact: Alexandre Pere