Chapter 3 Compile and run experiments

Here, we provide a guide to compiling and running our experiments using our Docker image.

Please file an issue on GitHub if something is unclear or does not work.

3.1 Docker

You’ll need Docker to follow this guide. This guide was written using Docker version 20.10.2, build 20.10.2-0ubuntu1~20.10.1.

3.1.1 Getting the right image

We’ve already built a Docker image for this project with everything needed to compile and run our code inside: https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/amlalejini/gptp-2021-an-exploration-of-exploration

You can pull our Docker image from DockerHub:

docker pull amlalejini/gptp-2021-an-exploration-of-exploration

Now, if you run docker image ls, you should see something like

REPOSITORY                                           TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED       SIZE
amlalejini/gptp-2021-an-exploration-of-exploration   latest    d0f392bfe129   3 hours ago   2.67GB

3.1.2 Spinning up a container

You can spin up a container with the image we just pulled from DockerHub, using docker run -it <IMAGE>. Note that <IMAGE> corresponds to the IMAGE ID field for the image we want to run with (which you can get from docker image ls). In this example, I would run:

docker run -it d0f392bfe129

This will drop you inside a container made with the correct docker image. You can see everything that’s been installed/included in the container by looking through this DockerFile. Most importantly, the container already has our GitHub repository and the correct version of the Empirical library included. Even more conveniently, we’ve already compiled the experiment for you (/opt/GPTP-2021-Exploration-Of-Exploration/dia_world).

3.1.3 Running inside the container

Inside the container, navigate to /opt/GPTP-2021-Exploration-Of-Exploration and run ./dia_world. Done! You’re running the software used to conduct our experiments!

To generate a configuration file (Dia.cfg), you can run ./dia_world --gen. You can also run ./dia_world --help for a list of configuration options. The executable will default to the parameters specified in a Dia.cfg file (in the same directory), but you can override any setting on the command line. E.g., ./dia_world -POP_SIZE 42 will configuration the population size to be 42.

You can exit the container at any time with exit.

3.1.4 Copying content from the container

To copy files out of the container to your local machine, use the docker cp command.