chafdev/labpaldatalineage

Easily run experiments on a computer

If you are doing research in Computer Science, it is very likely that every now and then, you need to run experiments on your computer. LabPal is a Java library that allows you to quickly setup an environment for running these experiments, collating their results and processing them in various ways: generating tables, data files, plots, etc.

Features

• All your experimental setup (including your code, its input files and library dependencies) can be bundled into a single, runnable JAR file, making it easy for anybody to download and re-run your experiments.
• The runnable JAR acts as a web server; when launched, a user can see all the experiments and control their execution using a web browser.
• For a few more lines of code, the input/output parameters of an experiment can come with a small textual description that is displayed in the web interface, so that a user can understand the meaning of each data element. You can do the same with the lab itself, and each experiment it contains.
• Automated generation of PDF and PNG plots (using GRAL or Gnuplot) and tables (in beautified LaTeX, HTML or CSV). You can perform transformations to the tables before plotting them, and also customize the display of your plots (scales, colors, labels) very easily.
• Each running experiment can update a visual progress bar; LabPal can even estimate and show the time remaining before they complete.
• A set of partially executed experiments can be saved to disk, then reloaded and resumed at a later time (or even on a different machine).

Why use LabPal?

To run experiments on a computer, you probably already write command-line scripts for various tasks: generating your data, saving it into text files, process and display them as plots or tables to include in a paper or a presentation. But soon enough, your handful of "quick and dirty" batch files becomes a bunch of arcane, poorly documented scripts that generate and pass around various kinds of obscure temporary files. This situation brings two important problems in terms of research methodology:

• Problem 1: no one can reproduce your experiments. Too much cleaning up would be required to your setup before anybody else could understand how it works, so chances are you'll never make your scripts and data publicly available.

• Problem 2: you waste your time. Most of your batch and data files are so specific to your experiments that even yourself are unlikely to reuse them on your next project; you'll start from scratch instead. This is not a very productive use of your time.

I want to use LabPal!

• Just download the latest release and include it in your classpath.
• Or download our template project that includes a few extra features (like a boilerplate Readme and Ant build script).

If you want to know more about LabPal's features:

• Read the short tutorial
• Look at our lab examples to learn how to use various features
• Look at our slightly longer instructions
• Consult the online API documentation

About LabPal

LabPal was developed by Sylvain Hallé, Associate Processor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada. Pr. Hallé is also the head of LIF, a research lab, where LabPal is extensively used for the processing of experimental results.