Question - Add remote machine with Python API

[vmtenorio]

Hi all!

First of all thank you for the amazing application. I would like to ask something and also report an error in the documentation,.

I'm trying to execute a remote hyperparameter optimization using python API, but I'm unable to add the remote machine to the pool of available devices. I tried the code snippet that appears in this page. However, it tells me that ExperimentConfig object has no attribute machines. The only thing similar that I found is the machine_list attribute of the training_service object inside the ExperimentConfig, but I'm unable to add them there as well, as its type is a dataclasses._MISSING_TYPE.

The documentation about running experiments in remote machines is using yaml files everywhere. I also tried to import a yaml configuration to an ExperimentConfig object with no success, so I'm limited to CLI to run experiments in remote machines. I'm sure there must be a way to do it with Python API, but I'm unable to find it, hope you can help me.

Kind regards.
Víctor

[vmtenorio]

Just in case anyone is facing the same problem, I just realized that you can load the information from a YAML file into an ExperimentConfig object using load method of the ExperimentConfig object. However, it throws an error when setting hybrid mode (local + remote), the error is the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "experiment_runner.py", line 100, in <module>
    experiment.run(port)
  File "/home/vtenorio/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/nni/experiment/experiment.py", line 162, in run
    self.start(port, debug)
  File "/home/vtenorio/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/nni/experiment/experiment.py", line 107, in start
    config = self.config.canonical_copy()
  File "/home/vtenorio/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/nni/experiment/config/base.py", line 161, in canonical_copy
    canon._canonicalize([])
  File "/home/vtenorio/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/nni/experiment/config/experiment_config.py", line 132, in _canonicalize
    platform = getattr(self.training_service, 'platform')
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'platform'

I still couldn't find a way to do it completely from the Python API, and the documentation still contains an error in this page, as the code included throws an error, or at least I couldn't make it work.

Regards.
Víctor