Better experiment oversight with sacred

We will install all 3 components you need and bring them together in this tutorial.

MongoDB is a programm that would run on a server ideally. It will collect and comunicate information with the machines that run your experiments.

For installation, google install mongodb and your exact OS e.g., Linux Mint 18 (makes a big difference)

You can run MongoDB on your server via

sudo systemctl start mongodb # Ubuntu 14 
	
sudo service start mongod # Ubuntu 16

You can check if its currently running via

sudo systemctl status mongodb # Ubuntu 14 

sudo service status mongod # Ubuntu 16

It can also help to add this command to your start up applications.

Sacred is the python library that organizes your experiments. You will need to install it alongside pymongo.

pip install sacred pymongo

You can now set up experiments by following this GUIDE. This guide is great read it well.

sacredboard is the engine that asks your server for the collected experiment information and displays it for you in a browser window.

First you best set up a python 3(!) conda environment and install

conda create -n sacredboard python=3.5

source activate sacredboard

pip install sacredboard

! Note that this needs not to be the same environment as your project. In fact I got my own conda environment just for sacredboard.

Now that we got:

we need to connect it all.

First thing to do is setting up a unique port for the mongo server (dont ask why, but its important).

Next, we start an experiment that send all information to our mongoDB server data base via our unique port (same as above!!)

python myexperiment.py -m IP_OF_MONGO_SERVER:MY_PORT:MY_DB

python experiment.py -m 192.168.1.1:27017:cryoDB

We can now observe our experiments by

sacredboard -m 192.168.1.1:27017:cryoDB

That is it already that is all you need to know.

Except, if you run experimetns on servers of the UvA due to security stuff it is best to

run

  ssh -R yourport:localhost:yourport fs2

Provide feedback