ck 1.6.8

Collective Knowledge - lightweight knowledge manager to organize, cross-link, share and reuse artifacts

Collective Knowledge Infrastructure - enabling open,
collaborative and reproducible experimentation,
knowledge sharing and predictive analytics.

License
=======
* Permissive 3-clause BSD license
(see LICENSE.txt file for more details).

Requirements
============
* has been validated on Linux, Windows, Android (partially), Mac OS X
* only python >= 2.6 (3.0+ is natively supported)

Optional dependencies
=====================
* Python package 'Tkinter' or 'tkinter' or 'pyperclip'
if copy to clipboard functionality is required
* Python package 'matplotlib' to plot graphs
(during autotuning or performance/energy/accuracy modeling)
* Python package 'psutil' to properly terminate running process
on Windows after timeout

Introduction
============

We have developed Collective Knowledge Framework and Repository (CK)
primarily to solve numerous problems we faced during past 20 years
of our research on building self-optimizing computer systems
(combining performance autotuning, machine learning and run-time adaptation):

* numerous and ever changing hardware
* black-box compilers
* ad-hoc tools with evolving and incompatible interfaces
* multiple heterogeneous and possibly proprietary data formats
* raising number of design and optimization choices
* raising amount of experimental data to process
* ad-hoc, outdated and non-representative benchmarks with limited data sets
* lack of unified and reproducible mechanisms for exchange of experimental results
* problems accessing proprietary software (compilers, benchmarks)
and hardware for artifact evaluation

Eventually, we created CK as an open-source and light-weight SDK
(~200K python code) to help our colleagues preserve, organize,
describe, cross-link and share their code and data (benchmarks,
data sets, scripts, libraries, tools, experimental results,
models, tables, graphs, articles, etc) as reusable Python-based
components with a very simple API (just one function with
JSON in and JSON out) and JSON-based schema-free meta description,
as shown in the following examples:
* https://github.com/ctuning/ctuning-programs
* https://github.com/ctuning/ctuning-datasets-min
* https://github.com/ctuning/ck-analytics
* https://github.com/ctuning/ck-autotuning

CK also helps abstract access to ever-changing (and possibly
proprietary) tools and hardware via wrappers with the same JSON
API while protecting experimental setups from low-level
interface/data changes (wrappers handle such changes as well
as setting up environment for multiple versions of a given
and possibly pre-installed tool or library).

All components has DOI-style UID and can be transparently indexed
and searched via third-party Hadoop-based ElasticSearch,
shared via GIT, and connected together into experimental pipelines
(workflows) just as LEGO(TM) to quickly prototype various research ideas,
crowdsource experiments, reproduce and improve past techniques.

Furthermore, CK can simplify connection of unified experiments
to powerful predictive analytics tools such as scikit-learn
and R (statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning)
thus helping non-specialists perform statistical analysis of results,
automate exploration of large, multi-dimensional design
and optimization choices, speed up decision making, and
easily share results with colleagues via interactive graphs
and articles, as demonstrated in our latest CK-powered interactive publications:
* http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:cd11e3a188574d80
* http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:6f40bc99c4f7df58

Unlike existing centralized web-based services
that force users to upload all their code and data before
being processed, CK allows users organize their local artifacts
and always keep track of them on their own machine
while sharing them only if needed as P2P or via existing
private and public repositories.

CK can also complement existing technology such as Docker
and VM hardwired images by decomposing them into unified
and reusable components with a simple, extensible and unified JSON API.
This is particularly useful for computer systems' R&D where
software and even hardware is changing every day and becomes
outdated very quickly. Hence, researchers would often like to
be able to actually rebuild, customize and rerun experimental
setups using their own native tools (latest or different operating
systems, compilers and libraries) rather than using VM images -
CK was also developed to solve this issue. For example,
various research projects already use CK to share their
research artifacts and scenarios:
$ http://github.com/ctuning/reproduce-carp-project
$ http://github.com/ctuning/reproduce-pamela-project
$ http://github.com/ctuning/reproduce-clsmith
$ http://github.com/ctuning/reproduce-ck-paper

CK can be invoked in a unified way via command line or JSON web service.
It can also be directly invoked from other programs and tools
written in practically any language including C, C++, Fortran,
PHP and Java using OpenME event-based plugin framework (we worked
with the community to add similar plugin interface to GCC 4.6+
and plan to add it to LLVM).

Eventually, unified mechanisms of artifact and knowledge exchange
in the CK allows the community to gradually validate and improve
shared techniques and data sets thus enabling truly open,
collaborative, interdisciplinary and reproducible research
similar to physics and other natural sciences. To some extent,
it can help computer engineers and researchers become data scientists
and focus on innovation while liberating them from ad-hoc,
repetitive, boring and time consuming tasks.
It should also help solve some of big data issues we faced
since 1993 by actively using and sharing predictive models
instead of large amount of data.

You may check out our motivation as well as real usage scenarios,
CK-powered interactive papers and websites (some are based on previous
version aka Collective Mind) here:

* [Interactive article 1] http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:6f40bc99c4f7df58
* [Interactive article 2] http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:cd11e3a188574d80
* [All shared artifacts via CK]: http://github.com/ctuning/reproduce-ck-paper
* [Our open publication model] http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4020
* [Live CK repository] http://cknowledge.org/repo
* [CK-generated interactive CV] http://fursin.net/cv.html
* [ADAPT workshop with Reddit-based reviewing] http://adapt-workshop.org
* [Android client for crowd-benchmarking] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.collective_mind.node

Further details about CK including getting started guide,
real usage scenarios, and developer guide is available here:

* https://github.com/ctuning/ck/wiki

Copyright
=========
This software is being developed by the non-profit
cTuning foundation and its volunteers.

(C)opyright 2014-2015 Grigori Fursin,
cTuning foundation and contributors

http://cTuning.org

See COPYRIGHT.txt for more details.

Authors
=======
* Grigori Fursin, http://fursin.net
* Anton Lokhmotov, https://www.hipeac.net/~anton

Installation
============
We made a special effort to make CK installation
as simple as possible - it requires only standard
Python version 2.6 or above (3.x is supported).

CK has been successfully tested by volunteers on various
platforms including Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, CentOS, MacOS X,
Android (partial support through web services and OpenME)
and most of the recent Windows versions.

Note: since user packages may require extra functionality
such as scipy and scikit-learn, we have been
successfully using Anaconda python distribution
which includes all scientific packages required
for predictive analytics in CK.

You can install CK either via GIT (latest self-updatable
development version) or via PIP/Conda.

### PIP installation
$ pip install ck

### GIT installation

$ git clone https://github.com/ctuning/ck.git ck
$ cd ck
$ (sudo) python setup.py install

Now, you can simply add CK bin directory to your OS PATH
environment variable and you are ready to go.

Usage
=====

You can check that CK works via CMD:

$ ck

You should see information about ck options.

If you have IPython installed, you can then check CK installation
as following:

$ ipython

$ import ck.kernel as ck

$ ck.test()

$ ck.access('list module')

$ ck.access('load kernel default')

Now, you can use CK to pull various public CK repositories
(code and data shared as reusable components via GitHub
or Bitbucket) and run shared experimental workflows
(for example, to crowd-benchmark and autotune programs,
build predictive models of performance, analyze representative
benchmarks and data sets, install missing tools, ...).

For example, compiling and running any shared benchmark
on your Linux machine with GCC can be done simply as:

$ ck pull repo:ctuning-programs

$ ck compile program:cbench-automotive-susan --speed

$ ck run program:cbench-automotive-susan

Compiling and running such benchmarks on Windows or Android,
autotuning or crowdtuning them (performance, energy, accuracy, size, etc),
adding more data sets, applying machine learning to predict optimizations,
and any other shared scenario requires a few more steps
as described in our "Getting Started Guide":

* https://github.com/ctuning/ck/wiki

Adding new CK modules as containers for own data, as a wrapper
for some tool or as a workflow is also straightforward.
For example, you can add your own module 'hello' with an action 'say'
and with an entry 'world' as following (you can select all
default values by just pressing Enter):

$ ck add module:hello

$ ck add_action module --func=say

$ ck add hello:world

$ ck say hello:world

You can now find and customize Python dummy function 'say'
in the CK module 'hello' (module.py) via

$ ck find module:hello

You can also find associated CK entry hello:say and modify
its meta information (.cm/meta.json) via

$ ck find hello:world

Please, follow CK guide for more details:

* https://github.com/ctuning/ck/wiki

Questions/comments/discussions?
===============================
Please, use our mailing lists:
* General topics of knowledge preservation, sharing and reuse
as well as collaborative and reproducible R&D: http://groups.google.com/group/collective-knowledge
* Software and hardware performance/energy/size/reliability
(auto/crowd)tuning: http://groups.google.com/group/ctuning-discussions

Publications
============
Concepts has been described in the following publications:

* http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06256
* http://hal.inria.fr/hal-01054763
* http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4020
* https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00436029

If you found CK useful and/or interesting, you are welcome
to reference any of the above publications in your articles
and reports.

Fun
===
* CK GIT commits as a video: http://cknowledge.org/soft/commits/ck-visualization.mp4

CK-powered projects
===================

CK is currently used in the following projects:

* building public repository of benchmarks, data sets, tools, predictive
models and optimization knowledge in a unified format with the help
of the computer engineering community
(http://cknowledge.org/repo , http://c-mind.org/repo)

* implementing universal multi-dimensional, multi-objective,
plugin-based autotuning combined with crowdsourcing, predictive
analytics and run-time adaptation (to enable self-optimizing
computer systems). We support OpenCL, CUDA, OpenMP, MPI, compiler
and any other tuning for performance, energy, size, reliability,
cost and any other metrics across small kernels/codelets and
large applications (http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:cd11e3a188574d80).

* implementing crowd-benchmarking (crowdsourcing workload characterization
and compiler heuristic construction across numerous architectures using shared
computational resources such as mobile phones, tablets, cloud services, etc.
(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.collective_mind.node ,
http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:cd11e3a188574d80)

* supporting artifact evaluation initiatives for major conferences
and journals where all artifacts are shared as reusable components (and not
just as black box virtual machine images) along with publications
(http://ctuning.org/event/ae-ppopp2016 , http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4020 ,
http://adapt-workshop.org)

* enabling open, collaborative and reproducible research and experimentation
with interactive publications focusing on computer engineering
( http://cTuning.org/reproducibility-wiki )

* enabling interactive and reproducible articles for Digital Libraries
(http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:cd11e3a188574d80 ,
http://cknowledge.org/repo/web.php?wcid=29db2248aba45e59:6f40bc99c4f7df58)

* serving as a personal knowledge manager to organize, interconnect
and preserve all personal coda and data via simple JSON
meta with UIDs and semantic tags.

You are welcome to add your own CK-powered project here!

Acknowledgments
===============

CK development is coordinated by the non-profit cTuning foundation
(cTuning.org). We would like to thank the EU TETRACOM 609491 project
(www.tetracom.eu) for initial funding and dividiti (www.dividiti.com)
for continuing support. We are also extremely grateful to all volunteers
for their valuable feedback and contributions.