LabNotebook

A simple experiment manager for deep learning experiments

labnotebook allows you to:

• flexibly save all your experimental data in a postgres database through a very simple interface, including configuration, models, results, and training curves.
• monitor any indicators from your running experiments by streaming them through a web application:
• access all this data forever through the web app, through sqlalchemy, or through traditional sql text queries.

All you need to do is to modify your code to include labnotebook.start_experiment() and labnotebook.stop_experiment() and pass the info you would like to save to the database as arguments. As an option, you can save information for each training step by using labnotebook.step_experiment().

You can see a very simple example notebook here.

Why labnotebook?

In the life sciences, scientists write everything in their lab notebooks. I wanted a similar permanent store for my PyTorch experiments that allowed me to:

• asynchronously look at what was going on. Tensoboard obviously provides excellent functionality, albeit with an interface and storage system that I didn't especially like. It's very hard to keep track of all the indicators of old experiments and to compare them to newer experiments.

• store everything forever in a queryable database. Sacred provides some of this functionality, but the interface is complex and inflexible. In addition, I think experimental data is relational data intermixed with nosql data, and postgres is better adapted to the type of queries for this kind of experimental data.

Installation

Set up a postgres database:

Follow the detailed installation guides, create your database, and make a note of your database's url. It's usually of the form postgres://<username>:<password>@localhost/<databasename>.

Install labnotebook:

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/henripal/labnotebook.git

Enter the directory and install labnotebook locally:

cd labnotebook
pip install .

Start the API:

Once you've installed the package, you can run the following command on your database url to start the API:

start_backend <database_url>

Start the webapp:

Simply navigate to labnotebook/frontend and double click on index.html.

Usage and Documentation:

A simple example notebook is available here.

Limitations and To Dos:

This is a very early alpha version of the tool that I'd thought some people might enjoy. I haven't tested it on older browsers or frameworks. For now I've tested this only on Ubuntu, with PyTorch-style experiments, using chromium. I'm happy to get any feedback of how this runs on other platforms!

Attribution:

The front-end of this project uses VueJS, Vuetify and Highcharts.

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