Systems

Within Ramble’s variants configuration section, users can control which system is used for a set of experiments.

The system used can control many aspects of the experiment, and is intended to broadly map to a cluster. Experiments in a workspace can select different systems, and systems can apply default configurations for several parts of the experiment. These include defining default variables, selecting a default workflow manager or package manager, and limiting (or selecting) the platform that an experiment can be used on.

Configuring Systems

Systems are controlled through a config option in the variants configuration section. The following shows an example of controlling this

variants:
  system: <system_name>

The default system is user-managed which simply requires the user to manually define aspects of the system used for validation in their workspace. The value of the system variant used can be a reference to a variable, and will be expanded following Ramble’s variable definitions logic.

Supported Systems

To begin with, the only supported system, provided with Ramble is below:

• user-managed

User Managed System

The selection of user-managed for system will require users to specify the max_nodes variable, telling Ramble how many nodes are available of the underlying platform.

Additionally, users have another default variant validate_system that is set to True by default to validate aspects of the system. Users can disable this by setting the variant to False explicitly.