crillab-metrics 0.2.1

rEproducible sofTware peRformance analysIs in perfeCt Simplicity

mETRICS - rEproducible sofTware peRformance analysIs in perfeCt Simplicity

Authors

• Thibault Falque - Exakis Nelite
• Romain Wallon - CRIL, Univ Artois & CNRS
• Hugues Wattez - CRIL, Univ Artois & CNRS

Why Metrics?

When developing a SAT solver, one of the most important parts is to perform experiments so as to evaluate its performance. Most of the time, this process remains the same, so that everybody collects almost the same statistics about the solver execution. However, how many scripts are there to retrieve experimental data and draw scatter or cactus plots? Probably as many as researchers in the domain. Based on this observation, this repository provides Metrics, a Python library, aiming to unify and make easier the analysis of solver experiments. The ambition of Metrics is to provide a complete toolchain from the execution of the solver to the analysis of its performance. In particular, this library simplifies the retrieval of experimental data from many different inputs (including the solver’s output), and provides a nice interface for drawing commonly used plots, computing statistics about the execution of the solver, and effortlessly organizing them (e.g., in Jupyter notebooks). In the end, the main purpose of Metrics is to favor the sharing and reproducibility of experimental results and their analysis.

Installation

To execute Metrics on your computer, you first need to install Python on your computer (at least version 3.8).

As the metrics library is available on PyPI, you install it using pip.

pip install crillab-metrics

Note that, depending on your Python installation, you may need to use pip3 to install it, or to execute pip as a module, as follows.

python3 -m pip install crillab-metrics

Using mETRICS

To present how to use metrics, let us consider an example, based on the results of the SAT Race 2019, in which 51 solvers have been run on 400 instances. Each experiment (corresponding to the execution of a solver on a particular instance) has a timeout set to 5000 seconds and a memory limit set to 128GB.

from metrics.wallet.dataframe.builder import CampaignDataFrameBuilder
campaign_df = CampaignDataFrameBuilder(campaign).build_from_campaign()

Extracting Data with metrics-scalpel

Experimental data can be retrieved with metrics-scalpel. To do so, a YAML configuration file has to be given to the program to allow it to retrieve the required data. A sample configuration is given below.

name: SAT Race 2019
date: July 12th, 2019
setup:
    timeout: 5000
    memout: 128000
experiment-wares:
    - CCAnrSim default
    - ...
    - smallsat default
input-set:
    name: sat-race-2019
    type: hierarchy
    path-list:
    - /path/to/the/benchmarks/of/sat/race/2019/
source:
  path: /path/to/the/results/of/sat-2019.csv
data:
  mapping:
    input: benchmark
    experiment_ware:
    - solver
    - configuration
    cpu_time: solver time

The first elements of this configuration give informations about the campaign: name , date, timeout and memout.

Observe that the different solvers are listed in this file. This is quite a strong requirement (and we plan to automatically discover the solvers in future version of Metrics), but this approach has been designed to allow, when needed, to specify more informations about the solvers (such as their compilation date, their command line, etc.).

Regarding the input-set, note that it is considered as a hierarchy. Whenever this is the case, metrics-scalpel explore the file hierarchy rooted at the given directory to discover each file it contains. It is also possible to give directly the list of the file, or to give a path to a file that contains this list.

The last part, concerning the mapping, allow to retrieve from the CSV file (in this case) which columns corresponds to the data expected by Scalpel.

Now, from this configuration, we can now load the whole campaign corresponding to the SAT competition.

from metrics.scalpel import read_yaml
campaign = read_yaml("/path/to/configuration.yml")

Exploiting Data with metrics-wallet

Now that we have extracted relevant data from our campaign, we can start building figures. The first step consists in extracting a data-frame from the read campaign.

from metrics.wallet.dataframe.builder import CampaignDataFrameBuilder
campaign_df = CampaignDataFrameBuilder(campaign).build_from_campaign()

Dynamic Plots

Notebook example here

Static Cactus Plot

Notebook example here

Static CDF Plot

Notebook example here

Static Scatter Plot

Notebook example here

Static Box Plot

Notebook example here

Static Tables

Notebook example here

Citing mETRICS