Drone (was Re: ObjectLoader & batch processing)

[Theodore C. Belding]

[I just sent out a partial email by mistake; sorry for the fewmets!]

Hi-
Since Manor mentioned my project, here's some more details.

I'm working with the CAR group (Michael Cohen, Bob Axelrod, and Rick 
Riolo) here at Michigan, on social science modeling in Swarm.  One of the 
things we'd like to do is create some tools to make our lives easier, 
including tools for automatically doing batch runs of a simulation program.

I've been working on a tool called Drone, which is written in Expect (a 
Tcl extension). It allows you to do things like:
 - run heatbugs, sweeping the number of heatbugs from n1 to n2 and their 
maximum ideal temperature from t1 to t2
 - do 10 runs for each number of bugs and each temperature, with 
different random seeds for each run
 - execute each run on a separate workstation, over the Internet
 - collect the results in a single directory
 - save enough information to be able to reproduce the experiment exactly
 - do all of this with a single comand and send you email when it's done
 - make coffee (actually this will probably have to wait until version 2.0)

Drone 1.0 will be released Real Soon Now.  It works and we're currently 
using it for production runs.  Right now, we're working to make 
sure that Drone will work with as many Unix platforms and simulation 
programs as possible. (There's nothing in Drone that is Swarm-specific.)
And we still need a good convention for passing command-line arguments to 
Swarm applications.

When we release Drone, we'll make an announcement on this list.

On a related topic, I think there was some discussion a while ago about 
more general scripting.  If you'd like to build a completely general 
scripting language into your Swarm application, so that you can control 
every aspect of the program using a script, I'd recommend taking a look at 
Tcl:

Ousterhout, J. K. (1994). Tcl and the Tk Toolkit. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 
0-201-63337-X.
news:comp.lang.tcl
http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/

Tcl was designed to be used as a control language for C applications. 
-Ted

--
Ted Belding                      <mailto:address@hidden> 
University of Michigan Program for the Study of Complex Systems
<http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~streak/>