lab 5.3

Benchmark your code

The Downward Lab Python package facilitates running experiments for the Fast Downward planning system. It uses the generic experimentation package Lab.

Lab is a Python package for running code on a large set of benchmarks. Experiments can be conducted on a single machine or on a cluster. The package also contains code for parsing results and creating reports. Currently, Lab comes bundled with Downward Lab.

Code: https://bitbucket.org/jendrikseipp/lab

Documentation: https://lab.readthedocs.io

Cite: please cite Downward Lab by using

@Misc{seipp-et-al-misc2017,
  author =       "Jendrik Seipp and Florian Pommerening and
                  Silvan Sievers and Malte Helmert",
  title =        "{Downward} {Lab}",
  year =         "2017",
  doi =          "10.5281/zenodo.790461",
  url =          "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.790461",
  howpublished = "\url{https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.790461}"
}

Install Lab

Lab supports Python 2.7 (deprecated) or Python >= 3.5. 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 mercurial python3 python3-venv

# Create and activate a Python 3 virtual environment for Lab.
python3 -m venv lab-venv  # or any other path instead of lab-venv
source lab-venv/bin/activate

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

If you want to install the latest development version and/or need to change Lab itself, you can clone the Lab repo and install it in the virtual environment:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/jendrikseipp/lab /path/to/lab
pip install --editable /path/to/lab

The --editable flag installs the project in “editable mode”, which makes any changes under /path/to/lab appear immediately in the installed package.

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

source lab-venv/bin/activate