lab 8.4

Benchmark your code

Lab is a Python package for evaluating solvers on benchmark sets. Experiments can run on a single machine or on a computer cluster. The package also contains code for parsing results and creating reports.

The Downward Lab Python package facilitates running experiments for the Fast Downward planning system. It uses the generic experimentation package Lab. Currently, Lab and Downward Lab are distributed together.

Code: https://github.com/aibasel/lab

Documentation: https://lab.readthedocs.io

Cite: please cite Downward Lab by using

@Misc{seipp-et-al-zenodo2017,
  author =       "Jendrik Seipp and Florian Pommerening and
                  Silvan Sievers and Malte Helmert",
  title =        "{Downward} {Lab}",
  publisher =    "Zenodo",
  year =         "2017",
  howpublished = "\url{https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.790461}"
}

Install Lab

Lab requires Python 3 and Linux (e.g., Ubuntu). We recommend installing Lab in a Python virtual environment. This has the advantage that there are no modifications to the system-wide configuration, and that you can create multiple environments with different Lab versions (e.g., for different papers) without conflicts:

# Install required packages, including virtualenv.
sudo apt install python3 python3-venv

# Create a new directory for your experiments.
mkdir experiments-for-my-paper
cd experiments-for-my-paper

# If PYTHONPATH is set, unset it to obtain a clean environment.
unset PYTHONPATH

# Create and activate a Python virtual environment for Lab.
python3 -m venv --prompt my-paper .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install Lab in the virtual environment.
pip install -U pip wheel
pip install lab  # or preferably a specific version with lab==x.y

# Store installed packages and exact versions for reproducibility.
# Ignore pkg-resources package (https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/4022).
pip freeze | grep -v "pkg-resources" > requirements.txt

Please note that before running an experiment script you need to activate the virtual environment with:

source .venv/bin/activate

We recommend clearing the PYTHONPATH variable before activating the virtual environment.