leeper / expfactory

software to generate a reproducible container with a battery of experiments

The Experiment Factory

documentation

The Experiment Factory is software to create a reproducible container that you can easily customize to deploy a set of web-based experiments. It's predecessor at Expfactory.org was never able to open up to the public, and this went against the original goal of the software. Further, the badly needed functionality to serve a local battery was poorly met with expfactory-python as time progressed and dependencies changes.

This version is agnostic to the underlying driver of the experiments, and provides reproducible, instantly deployable "container" experiments. What does that mean?

• You obtain (or build) one container, a battery of experiments.
• You (optionally) customize it
  • custom variables (e.g., a study identifier) and configurations go into the build recipe
  • you can choose to use your own database (default output is flat files)
  • other options are available at runtime
• The container is a Singularity container, meaning that it's a file that can be easily moved, and shared.
• You run the container, optionally specifying a subset and ordering, and collect your results

If you build on Singularity Hub anyone else can then pull and use your exact container to collect their own results. It is exact down to the file hash.

Experiment Library

The experiments themselves are now maintained under expfactory-experiments, official submissions to be found by expfactory can be added to the library (under development) to be tested that they meet minimum requirements.

The documentation and codebase are under development! For now, you can preview legacy experiments that will be ported to this updated version, and preview our documentation base provided with this repository. This code base is under development, so it might even be the case that not all files are added yet! Stay tuned.